[ad_1]
After all, there was a limit set to the number of things that could go wrong, all at once and all for Sporting – it was called Aberdeen and Aberdeen showed up at the right time.
It’s not that they didn’t warn us that this could happen, but despite the global analysis Before the game presented him as an “accessible opponent” no one expected free access to the play off of the Europa League. That is what happened, and Sporting, without money for large contracts, with an always vigilant presidential contest, adding several positive cases to covid-19, among which the technician and the doctor and nine players stand out, in short, Sporting that he didn’t. He had an official match on the calendar that beat a clinically healthier opponent, with eight leg matches, and irrelevant soccer.
The script was simple: get in right, take advantage of the rest of your muscles and score early. From abstract to practice in just seven minutes, Tiago Tomás became the youngest Sportinguista to score in UEFA competitions, at just 18 years, three months and nine days. Tomás was one of the many young people chosen by Rúben Amorim and supervised by Emanuel Ferro for the bank’s Alvalade; The average age of eleven, by the way, was closer to an Olympic team, which usually has three or four veterans, than to a professional team looking for its future in Europe.
After the first goal, Sporting would seek the second without success, despite some good ideas presented – and above all because of the clairvoyant talent of Vietto, a footballer whose speed of thought is not accompanied by his legs or his teammates.
Aberdeen, for its part, alternated moments of very high and intense pressure (and even interesting), with others much less ambitious, in which the difficulty was finding a place to accommodate eleven players in an area equivalent to a backyard.
But the difference in quality was large and therefore enough to allow for very short ball exchanges for the Scots in areas where talented opponents tend to complicate strategies and Aberdeen was definitely not one of them.
So under normal conditions, only an unlikely episode – a stroke of genius was impossible – would prevent Sporting from overtaking Aberdeen: a penalty goal, an own goal, an involuntary goal scored, a goal scored backwards. at a disoriented reception (I invite the reader to similar exaggerations).
Or lactic acid.
Because a team that does not run is a weakened team, and when justified differences in competitive pace were accentuated, there, in the middle of the second half, Aberdeen began to reach the baseline, or in the middle of it, and cross to the sports area. This is not to say that the Scots have accumulated exuberant bids afterwards, but neither does it hide the nervousness that Adam and the three centrals in front of him feel.
However, the predictability of Aberdeen’s two plans: always attack the depth on his left side, by the blond Hedges; hitting dead balls to the furthest stick, in the midst of a melee on the inside, made it easy to cover the lion in the moments when the legs began to weaken. Then Sporting had to hold the ball, freeze the game and rotate the players in defense, midfield and attack to make up for the lost brilliance and most of all stay calm.
It went well and finally good news. Then comes LASK and then who knows what will come.
