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Every year, in the middle of the championship, the Futebol Clube do Porto takes a day off. Whether out of habit, tiredness, boredom or pride, that sabbatical always coincides with the trip to Alvalade. When you visit Sporting, Porto is less Porto than in any other game of the season. It is a Porto B, decaffeinated, white label, medium fat Porto, medium Porto Porto. Not even the bad results, there is no smoother field in Portugal for Porto, they cause a shudder of indignation, a “this cannot go on like this”. Anything. Porto rests in Lisbon, walks through the capital, returns to Invicta with a defeat or a draw, the occasional victory, and nothing changes. In the following season, history repeats itself.
I don’t know if this will be impotence or arrogance. Last week I took the trouble to read some FC Porto commentators and nothing seemed to indicate that Porto were preparing for the most difficult start on the calendar. They talked about the superiority of the Porto squad, the chronic weakness of Sporting and, reading these treatises of pride, I thought they were capable of investing all their savings in a resounding victory for Porto. We arrived on Saturday night, and that overwhelming Porto, ready to decimate a weak and immature Sporting, never appears. He sits there waiting for victory to fall into his lap and, except for this indomitable fighter Pepe, no one seems willing to apply the famous “intensity”.
In Alvalade, Porto plays in spa mode, as if the opponent were a masseuse, a stress ball. Without doing much for that, he catches up to win before the break and enters the second half in a pacifist, antiviolent way, whom he tacitly asks for a non-aggression pact. Players, whether new or old, play without nervousness, waiting for time to pass. Goalkeeper Marchesín can even get a yellow card for delaying the return of the ball in play, this two weeks after a prophylactic speech by Sérgio Conceição on the anti-game that had no effect. Because of Porto’s sins, Sporting scores a goal just near the end of the match and suddenly Porto awakens and, in the little time left, still manages to create dangerous situations. But, as in the story of the hare and the tortoise, it was too late.
There has to be an explanation for the gap between Porto’s income when he visits Sporting and when he goes to Estádio da Luz. It is true that Sporting does not suffer from the same complex that hinders the movements of Benfica players when they play against Porto. Sporting, regardless of the performers on the field, never go in “stage fright” to face the dragons. The team plays without the complexes and terrors that plague Benfica teams. But Porto also plays without the sharpness and high alertness that they usually reserve for matches against their biggest rival.
That Sérgio Conceição manages to motivate the team for the games against Benfica is not an extraordinary feat. This motivation is already inscribed in the genetic code of the club. Just as there seems to be a certain disdain or devaluation of Sporting that makes Porto, over the years, repeatedly stumble over the same stone. Against Benfica, Porto want to show that they are the best. Against Sporting he comes with that certainty and, therefore, he relaxes, he condescends, he rests in the shadow of that superiority. And as much as the results discourage this posture, it is repeated with the force of inescapable things, a curse or a consecrated inertia: “let’s rest there today, which is the Lord’s day.” It seems that there are ghosts.
Players and coaches like to say that the past does not count, that statistics do not win games and all that is true, greenish, clear as water, they are the ones who want to say that they are going to write a new page and appeal to the concentration, not on either virgins or history and they play like it’s the first game of their life and they play like it’s the last game of their life. But those who watched France-Portugal last week after seeing France’s exhibition against Ukraine days earlier and the authoritarian displays of France that won the 2018 world cup did not go unnoticed by the ghosts and angels of the 2016 final. on the lawn: malevolent ghosts in the spirit of the French, guardian angels for the Portuguese.
Statistics do not win games because if that were Portugal, they would have left Paris with the usual defeat, but history has weight, and Éder’s goal and the image of the Lusitanian celebrations of four years ago in the heart of the Stade de France They inhibited Deschamps ‘team and freed Fernando Santos’ boys, who played with the prudence that characterizes him but without complexes, with the legitimate authority of a champion, without arrogance, without boasting and without victimization.
Looking at the last France-Portugal, I have to conclude that the 2016 final represented a tectonic shift. Portugal not only won a European championship, they earned the respect of an opponent who looked Portugal up and down. Now things have changed. Maybe one day things will change in the way Porto views Sporting. Pretending that ghosts don’t exist is the easiest way to continue living nightmares in the authentic haunted house where Alvalade was converted for Porto.
