Ajax just killed an experienced Juventus team with its young and hungry kids, despite Cristiano Ronaldo’s early heroics

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• Donny van de Beek and Matthijs de Ligt, two of Ajax’s youngest but brightest talents, just duped Juventus.
• Cristiano Ronaldo got on the scoresheet early on, but he has just been dumped out of the UEFA Champions League by a European upstart.
• Ajax defeated Juventus 2-1 on Tuesday, 3-2 on aggregate, and progresses to the semi-final stage of the tournament.
• Read more of Business Insider’s coverage for the 2018-2019 soccer season right here.
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Cristiano Ronaldo’s Juventus team just got dumped out of the UEFA Champions League by Ajax, a European upstart wrecking its way through the continent’s biggest soccer tournament.

Ronaldo, a five-time Champions League winner, struggled to exert his traditional dominance in the early stages of the competition after swapping Real Madrid for Juve in a $130 million deal last summer.

The striker got sent off in his first Champions League outing for the Italians in September, scored just one goal in the group stages, and only really got going in the second leg of the Round of 16 match against Atletico Madrid, when he scored a hat-trick to pull Juventus back from the brink of defeat last month and into this month’s quarter-final.

Read more: Cristiano Ronaldo’s heroic hat trick doesn’t change the fact that his game remains in long-term decline

The 34-year-old scored in the first leg in the Netherlands last week, ensuring Juventus returned to Italy with an away goal advantage. 

And even though he netted once again, an incredible and seemingly unstoppable bullet header in the 28th minute of the second leg in Turin on Tuesday, he then watched powerless as the Dutch team, a side filled with cool and calm kids, came back into the match and upset the experienced Italians.

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See Also:

• Cristiano Ronaldo bought an ultra-rare Rolls Royce worth $360,000 — take a look
• Lionel Messi is 3 times more likely to lift the Champions League trophy this season than Cristiano Ronaldo
• Lionel Messi left battered, bruised, and bleeding after overzealous challenge from Chris Smalling

SEE ALSO: 19-year-old Juventus player Moise Kean is partly to blame for the racist abuse he gets, according to his teammate

DON’T MISS: 5 charts that show how truly awful Cristiano Ronaldo has been in the Champions League this year

Source: Business Insider – feedback@businessinsider.com (Alan Dawson)