Apart from Pepe’s head, darkened by shy growing hair and not white thanks to the usual cut close to the skin, the first glimpse of the classic at the Estádio do Dragão returned another strangeness, an unexpected sign given the magnitude of the occasion. The second minute of the game was still stretching, FC Porto had the ball and took it well to the right of the attack, to the rebellious Chico Conceição, who received it and found himself in front with three players from a cautious Benfica, arranged in their path. One was João Mário, the other Kökçü and the closest Morato, but none of them decided to close the path closely to the left-hander who then lent himself to his maneuvers, pretended to go to the left, went to the right and crossed.
The correspondence dripped over Evanilson’s head, an isolated body in the area, punctuated by the forehead that sent the ball into Trubin’s hands, wasting the pretense. So early, right at the start, with their heads and legs fresh, the Benfica team appeared passivity, almost a posture of waiting instead of acting with an air of ‘let’s see what happens’, divergent from the amount the game had at hand. game: not taking points from the Porto home team, they would return to Lisbon overtaken by their Lisbon rival in the lead of the championship. With the clock getting fatter and cotton wool on the pitch, however, it was understood that the folly came from the baggage brought to the game and not so much from the attitude.
In the first half, Benfica played less than they saw playing, or they forced them to stop playing, almost controlled by the plan that a self-respecting coach would know that Sérgio Conceição would induce in his players. Driven by a mission, the dragons’ actions seemed from the beginning to be as premeditated as they are supposed to be, forcing behavior and then taking advantage of the consequences that were soon seen. Letting central defenders Otamendi and António Silva have the ball, FC Porto was concerned with blocking paths to the center but inviting the Reds to try them if they dared, asking Galeno and Conceição to press from outside to inside on the full-back line. Due to the way they defended, they forced Roger Schmidt’s team to dig in: they risked a pass to the midfielders, always with someone in their shadow, or they resorted to long balls.
Almost always, the lack of solutions resulted in Benfica looking for runs from Rafa, aiming at the defenders’ backs, where he insisted on trying those from Otávio, the newcomer who is now the fastest and most agile of the defenders in taking care of space. between the last line and the goal. Likewise, the useful Tengstedt, if used to threaten this depth, did not have plays that lived long enough to make these runs. Kökçü, sent to the left, was a ghost on the pitch, lost in the blue wall and never having the ball in front of the game. The Reds did not live, they simply existed in Dragão as FC Porto’s plan took effect.
With Evanilson giving a lot of himself to the game in support, running away from the central defenders and lowering himself onto the field to serve as a reference, Galeno, Pepê and Chico Conceição were left to sit back in many one-on-one situations with Benfica’s remaining defenders when one of the central defenders I was following the Brazilian striker’s deception. This happened at times when the Reds, aware of their bumpy existence, did not go to Diogo Costa’s area to press. Until the break, they were always overtaken when they did, trying to act like thieves by arranging the players in a line if Alan Varela retreated to the central defenders and took them all out of the scene with a vertical pass.
Galeno’s first goal, in the 20th minute, from a corner, exposed Benfica’s mess also at set pieces. The second highlighted the ease with which, time and time again, FC Porto beat the opposing pressure and reached the area needing just a few passes. On the right, the ball stopped at Chico Conceição when the Reds even seemed organized to cover him, with Otamendi at the head, but, with his knees bent and staring at his left-hander, the Argentine world swimming champion jumped to the side, he uncovered grass on the winger’s left foot and let him cross to the second post, where Evanilson jumped for Galeno to score again with his offer, in the 44th minute. The advantage was the consummation of the signals and FC Porto, thanks to the coach’s son’s boots, had more chances.
And from an amorphous Benfica, almost always incapable of adjusting to the circumstances, until half-time the only thing that was seen was the adaptation of momentarily switching Di María aside, pulling to the left, perhaps closer to a Morato towards whom the team was leaning, sometimes, due to targeted pressure from FC Porto – to cover the possibility of an exit for Aursnes even more firmly. With the ball, nothing worked, on the contrary harming the Reds at the moment of loss due to the deficiency brought by the Argentine factory when it was time to close his corridor. When attacking, Benfica would only have two moments: a tricky free-kick, scored quickly by Di María for Tengstedt, in the area, to receive with his chest and shoot over; and in the only successful play he achieved, by combining João Mário’s calmness with the ball, I managed to have Rafa attempt a ball that went towards Diogo Costa.
The film was not the same, the mise en scène was similar: for the second time in four days, Benfica was surpassed in terms of strategy and the way the players behaved on the field.
To enter Florentino Luís at half-time in the locker room it was, unsurprisingly, Kökçü, the most blatant of those affected by the lack of preparation and adaptation, with him Morato and his corpulence and toughness of kidneys to deal with the slender twirls of Chico Conceição, full of disdain towards the Brazilian. He was replaced by Álvaro Carreras and Benfica initially had around 10 minutes in the second half to push the hosts back with the projection they gained on that flank. To try to stop the bleeding in the center of the field, Schmidt advanced João Mário to the left and the team managed to get some ball closer to the other team’s goal.
But, by stretching so diligently, stretching the team further as the result required, Benfica was the blanket that uncovered one parish to try to take care of another. The need to make ends meet in attack opened holes that FC Porto, keeping their three musketeers of speed up front, waited for recovered balls to take advantage of, in a hurry. And with a plan, again, discoverable in his actions.
When the fantastic Di María, a supporter of the team on so many nights, was sent back to the right, where traces of guided passes in the haystack and combinations that only he sees tend to appear, Sérgio Conceição’s team knew that the gold would be there at the moment of recovering the ball, deciding how and where to execute the first passes. And behind the regretful Argentine, Wendel set sail, sprinting through the middle of the field, forcing Aursnes to have to choose between getting out of his way or staying with Galen. The Norwegian chose the most recent call-up to the Brazilian team, who thus passed to the winger who returned the courtesy. At 55′, Benfica’s intentions to react took an ax that made the Dragon release fireworks, literally.
What cut the root of any pretense from those who had come from Lisbon happened five minutes later, Otamendi’s leg delivering that blow when he lowed Chico Conceição close to the touchline. The second yellow card took away a player and hope from Benfica, with no one needing to elaborate on the scenario: if with eleven on the field it was what it was like with just ten?
It was the continuation of a kind of massacre, an opening of the stadium’s throat to be heard beyond Douro. When Sérgio Conceição, always restless on the bench, turned to the bench and showed the club’s symbol knitted on his shirt, he hit his chest with his palm. The chorus of screams at Dragão intensified and Benfica was already dying, writhing on the grass in the face of the trampling that had not yet seen FC Porto’s final escape. Among the various opportunities he created, including a header from Nico González, alone in the area, and Chico Conceição’s sudden shot from distance, it was a rush from Pepê, on the right, to pierce the last hole in Trubin’s goal. When it was 4-0 there were still 15 minutes to play.
Faced with a lethargic body, reduced to doing everything possible to stop a siege and protect the area against the growth of humiliation, FC Porto slowed down. He changed the ball with another pause, some calm interrupting the fury as players left the bench and others sat there. David Neres, alone, was the only one capable of trying to jump the midfield line for a raucous swan song. No longer did Benfica even threaten to prowl the area of the dragons who, from one side, will have felt the pressure that a certain type does not give up, as he says and repeats. With their coach’s demands, FC Porto ended up resuming their presence in Trubin’s goal, surrounding their team’s area to be left with rebounds and second balls if their first attempts collided with an opponent.
In one of these last collections and recycling of plays, Nico González played to the right, Jorge Sánchez had time and crossed with aim at the punishment given by Danny Namaso, whose jump and head wrapped the grave where the dragons deposited the body of a Benfica man devoid of life, robbed of the ability to remedy anything. With a 5-0 and so much noise of apotheosis in the arena, the referee didn’t even make up for a minute for the hit and run committed in front of so many witnesses, thousands, who made it easy to x-ray what happened at Dragão: in an hour and a half, whoever followed nine points behind the championship leader, it was superior in every metric, nuance, behavior or whatever of the football game that took place.
In one of these last collections and recycling of plays, Nico González played to the right, Jorge Sánchez had time and crossed with aim at the punishment given by Danny Namaso, whose jump and head wrapped the grave where the dragons deposited the body of a Benfica man devoid of life, robbed of the ability to remedy anything. With a 5-0 and so much noise of apotheosis in the arena, the referee didn’t even make up for a minute for the hit and run committed in front of so many witnesses, thousands, who made it easy to x-ray what happened at Dragão: in an hour and a half, whoever followed nine points behind the championship leader, it was superior in every metric, nuance, behavior or whatever of the football game that took place.
When the last whistle sounded, Sérgio Conceição opened his arms and pointed to his watch with one finger, ticking off the time that ended early. In this touch of the FC Porto coach there is a lot of what will explain such an unbalanced classic, excavating the unexpected gap in the field that has not been erased, only reduced, which will continue to separate the teams in the classification: the mouths that foam with attitude can boast and wanting in FC Porto players, but it is reductive, even too much, to justify the rout just by intangible control of the attitude. No, in Porto there was a team that was better because it was prepared to hurt where it could be most lethal and provoke the opponent into the situations it wanted to invade with punishments.
Roger Schmidt’s worst defeat at Benfica was only the coach’s fifth in the championship. In the end, caustic as is characteristic of him, the German consented without hesitation: “It was not our day, at all, technically, tactically and physically.” Reason protects him in all these aspects. He admitted that losing like this, in this way, “is a disaster”. And in the end, as in the beginning, the strangeness was present, because it will always be strange for a coach of a great team to be surpassed across the board by the antics of a rival that he knows well, or should. Benfica’s body will sleep tonight at Dragão, there it lies, but championship football will make up for it with the simple blessing that can be easily summed up: there are 10 rounds left and each game is a setting sun that gives way to rising from another.
It would also be strange if the team, and the coach, don’t learn lessons from what happened.
2024-03-03 22:00:00
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