In the 21st round of the Primeira Liga, SL Benfica defeated FC Arouca 2-1 at home. After the match, Benfica manager José Mourinho gave an interview.
17-year-old forward Anício Cláudio came off the bench in the 85th minute of the game and scored the winning goal for Benfica just one minute later.
“This kid Anício is fantastic for us, because he helped the team win the game. But I think I will struggle to fall asleep again tonight, because I’ll be thinking about why we created so many chances yet struggled to score more goals. I don’t want to keep talking about our stats – how many shots we took, how many times we penetrated the opponent’s penalty area… I don’t want to repeat these things monotonously, but certain problems keep cropping up in our style of play. We played brilliantly and created a lot of scoring chances, but ended up scoring very few. Fortunately, we finally scored the second goal, scored by this kid, and it earned us three points – three extremely important points that give us hope of climbing further up the rankings.”
Please talk about the tactical differences between your first half and second half performance.
“In the first half, we mostly launched attacks with long balls, but against an opponent defending with five centre-backs, it was hard to find attacking space through long passes. We barely showed any attacking threat in the central areas. Facing such an opponent, you need to keep launching attacks repeatedly, and to do that you have to dare to concede possession and strive to win it back immediately. We failed to do that in the first half, allowing Arouca to get a few dangerous counterattack opportunities. Even if they didn’t pose a real threat, they could keep possession in the midfield – they organised well and caused us problems.”
“Besides, I also felt the referee created some problems for us on the touchline, but maybe I’m wrong because I didn’t see the specific situations clearly. However, we were extremely dominant in the second half, barely giving the opponent any chance to play the ball out. They had to defend with all their might, and they defended brilliantly, almost getting the one point they wanted. But considering the chances we created, we thoroughly deserved this victory.”
Benfica are currently third in the Primeira Liga standings, and Porto and Sporting CP, the top two teams, will face each other in this round’s league match. Will you watch that game?
"If we had drawn today, I might have said I hope Sporting CP, the second-placed team, lose tomorrow. But we are Benfica – as long as it’s theoretically possible, we will fight for the top spot. We have no game tomorrow, and obviously for us, the best case is that the league leaders Porto lose this match. Now it’s their turn to fight for points. Since we won today, I can watch this game with peace of mind; if we hadn’t won, I might not even watch it at all."
