Teenage howler Benfica’s young keeper hands victory to United
This might have once been the kind of game that the brittle Manchester United teams of the post-sir Alex Ferguson era would have failed to win, and it did not take Jose Mourinho long to go on the attack afterwards when there was even the hint of a doubt about his methods in recent days.
It was almost as if the United manager was waiting for the criticism, so enthusiastically did he charge onto the offensive after his side won their third straight Champions League tie with a goal gifted to them by the 18-year-old Benfica goalkeeper Mile Svilar.
This was a game that dragged at times as much as the goalless draw at Anfield had done and it seemed to be the reaction to that which Mourinho had been chewing on in the intervening four days.
He solemnly declared that defensive competence was “not a crime” and then berated the managers who complain about injured players – “they cry, they cry, they cry” – in what might have been a reference to Antonio Conte’s recent regrets about absent friends.
Naturally Mourinho, never one to miss an opportunity, then went on to list those he is missing with the usual dramatic flourish.
It was, all told, your vintage Mourinho belligerence, a man more or less having an argument with the critics he had assembled in his own head and requiring very little external encouragement to do so. The truth was somewhere in between – a professional performance, but a terrible game for entertainment against a limited Benfica side who were down to 10 men by the end when Luisao picked up a second booking in time added on.
There was no doubting the defining moment, however, that being the error by the rookie Svilar, the Belgian teenager who had made his senior debut for Benfica just four days earlier.
He somehow misjudged Marcus Rashford’s 65th minute free-kick and stumbled backwards over his goal-line still clutching the ball, an awful moment for the young man which was greeted more with sympathy than derision.
His fellow Belgian Romelu Lukaku gave Svilar a pep talk and a hug at full-time and Mourinho talked him up more than any other youngster in living memory.
He declared the 18-year-old “a phenomenon” who was not afraid to take risks, and that the teenager would either be the Benfica goalkeeper for years or would cost a “suitcase of money” to sign.
He also said that he told his team to target the teenager. It is hard to imagine Mourinho placing the same level of trust in such a young goalkeeper.
It was a strange way to decide a European tie, and there was precious little enthusiasm among the local fans. It was quite a shock to see the Stadium of Light around half full and a general mood of indifference.
There may well have been goals elsewhere in the Champions League last night but Mourinho seemed to know exactly what was required to beat the first club he managed, and his current United side delivered that performance.
United were led by Nemanja Matic, who has been crucial in midfield for Mourinho in recent weeks. As at Anfield, they were required to hold the line late in the game as Benfica came in search of the equaliser. The reality was that United on a good day at home would have been capable of sweeping this level of opposition aside.
Mourinho made four changes from the side who had ground out a draw at Anfield, and while this one showed a fraction more imagination, there was not much in it judging by a first half in which there was scarcely a chance. The Portuguese champions had already lost 2-1 to CSKA Moscow at home before they were thrashed 5-0 by Basel in Switzerland in the previous round of games. Their manager Rui Vitoria says the best is yet to come.
The inclusion of Juan Mata and Henrikh Mkhitaryan did not seem to help Mourinho’s team retain the ball. As well as Matic, another former Benfica man, Victor Lindelof, was in the centre of defence. Mourinho said that Eric Bailly will not be back for the game against Huddersfield on Saturday and that Phil Jones was not fit to start the game.
The goal came after Svilar had already made the sort of small errors that suggested he was not coping with demands of the game, punching a ball over the bar because his positioning was wrong. Perhaps
Rashford noticed the jitters of his fellow teenager before he took a free-kick from the left channel that had Svilar backtracking.
The teenage goalkeeper must have been unaware of his position, because even punching or slapping the ball out would have been preferable to hanging on to it, which the Belgian did and consequently carried it back over the line and into the goal.
Rashford came off before the end of the game with what Mourinho said was nothing more than an attack of the cramps, and after that Luisao picked up a second booking for a foul on United substitute Scott Mctominay.
“Twelve matches, 10 victories, two draws, nine clean sheets,” Mourinho said, “we are not bad”. The alternative is the kind of unpredictability that affected United in his first season at the club, and Mourinho prefers them much more this way: well-organised, compact and very difficult to beat.