Gotta love APOEL...excelent performance, once again. There's clearly a lot of work into it, their manager is doing a wonderful job. I mean, some of those guys were reserve players in portuguese mid table teams, or even 2nd division...
It's great when we see these glimpses of real football, nowadays. The poor but well organized beating the favorites. It's getting harder and harder everyday.
Artem, if you read a few pages back, you can see that me or The_Special_One showed great respect for Zenit. It was (both times) Zenit fans bashing on Benfica... and we just replied saying that living with a great financial help makes it a lot easier, and we can't quite call it 'fair play'.
I agree with you..Zenit, despite having GAZPROM investment, doesn't spend like Anzhi, for example. But the fact that you have that support lets you keep your best players. I wish we could say the same for Fabio Coentrão, David Luiz, Di Maria and Ramires, for example. It makes a LOT of difference. Besides, you're building a great stadium. Who's paying it? Benfica, and many other clubs, have to pay for it...you can imagine how difficult it is, specially with the economical situation in Portugal.
Complaining about Benfica not having many portuguese on its starting eleven it's quite strange... Besides, as I said before, if there was a foreigner limit, clubs like Benfica would clap it. Portugal has many talented players. Benfica, for example, has some youth players signed every year by teams like Man City. It's reach the youth teams already. How can we compete with that?
I really think that what portuguese clubs do should be praised. Just compare how much we do in europe comparing with teams with a much larger budget... Sometimes people think that some talents just appear from nowhere. They perform that way because 'we' find and do a great work with them. Otherwise Dinamo Moscow had done great seasons when they signed 'half' european champion Porto team. Or Anzhi... and many others.
About Russian government investing into a football team, I see how hard it can be for you to understand, but I don't think that's normal. Politics shouldn't get into football, and why support one specific team? That will take some of truth on the league...
Schalke is totally different, I think...they are sponsored by GAZPROM. That's it.
About the match, I agree with you, Benfica isn't MUCH better than Zenit. You have a nice team. It was an interesting tie, as predicted. Considering the circunstances (playing with -15º and a very bad turf in St Petersburg), and facing you in our worst run of the last 3 seasons (4 matches without winning), I think we did a nice job. I always knew that the 3-2 result would be a very acceptable result for us (just check Benfica's home performance in european matches).
About Bruno Alves, it were Porto fans who booed Danny. Benfica supporters booed Bruno Alves, not only for the tackle, but because he always performs like that against Benfica... I could post you some videos, but I don't think that's necessary.
Thanks for the congratulations and good luck for the russian league. As I said before, I like your team a lot, you play nice football and have a quite balanced team, in my opinion.
) throwing money out of the window. Here in Portugal, as you don't have money, we need to scout around the world in order to snap the potential best player available.
