While league football might not have the late drama that the Champions League boasts, in Portugal things are about to step up to a whole new level.
On Saturday night, Benfica host their fiercest rivals at Estadio da Luz – Lisbon neighbours Sporting CP, and the winner will very likely take it all in never-before-seen drama.
AFPBut stopping Gyokeres is a whole different task[/caption]
The match is the penultimate of the season and with the two teams joint at the top of the Primeira Liga table 78 points it all comes down to this with tie-breaks settled by head-to-head results.
The first league meeting at the Alvalade was won 1-0 by the hosts, meaning any victory on Saturday and they get given the trophy at the home of their bitterest rivals.
For Benfica, a two-goal win and it’s theirs.
No capital city rivalry in Europe has been quite so evenly balanced to set up quite the extraordinary finale, but it’s been a long road to get here.
Both teams began the season with other head coaches, Sporting Ruben Amorim and Benfica Roger Schmidt.
German Schmidt won the title in 2023 before Amorim added his second in 2024, with his first in 2021 Sporting’s 19-year breakthrough despite being a member of Os Tres Grandes – Portugal’s ‘big three’.
Since then they’ve both found themselves on an even footing with the other of that trio Porto, but this year Lisbon has been the only thing that’s mattered.
Starting the season with Amorim, Sporting opened up a seven point title lead, but his departure to Manchester United saw it collapse to nothing under his replacement Joao Pereira.
Fans threw flares at the players who came to apologise for a 2-1 defeat to Club Brugge in the Champions League and Matheus Reis later admitted ‘Amorim was like a father to us, people don’t understand how much he meant’.
Pundit everywhere said Sporting’s resurgence was over, but in came Rui Borges from Vitoria Guimaraes to prove them all wrong, topping their title lead back up to six before an extraordinary winning run from Benfica cut the gap once more.
Achieving that feat was former Wolves manager Bruno Lage, who hasn’t been the only Premier League influence, in fact far from it.
Aging Argentine duo Nicolas Otamendi and Angel Di Maria are shining as bright as ever at the age of 37, with the latter long recovered from his Manchester United disaster to become an icon at the side where he made his name, turning down the big bucks from Lionel Messi’s Inter Miami.
That kind of loyalty is rewarded in Benfica, who fumed at the club over their £51million sale of academy megastar Joao Neves to Paris Saint-Germain last summer and didn’t let up.
President Rui Costa was booed at club meetings and a brutal banner was put up outside club offices reading ‘sell your mothers’ as they attacked the club’s money-first approach.
That all changed thanks to their foreign legends, though, with Otamendi serenaded after a win over Estoril last time out, scoring and commanding things at the back so much so that fans mobbed his car as it left the stadium garage later that night.
He’s now facing his toughest task, though, 44-goal Victor Gyokeres, who talkSPORT understands is on his way to Arsenal.
Sporting CP YouTubeA physical marvel, Gyokeres is causing as much fascination as Haaland[/caption]
The towering Erling Haaland clone is leading Mohamed Salah and Robert Lewandowski in the European Golden Boot race, and is achieving the kind of mythical status his fellow Scandinavian marksman enjoys where fans and journalists are now obsessing over his diet.
Unlike Haaland it’s not cow parts, but instead a special green smoothie with a secret recipe that he revealed ‘has lemon, lots and lots of lemon, our nutritionist wants a lemon tree by my house’.
However, Otamendi may be the true freak of nature, playing his best football so that he’s undroppable for Argentina where manager Lionel Scaloni said: “I wish Otamendi was always 30 or 35 years old and playing at this level.”
After his Bentley recovered from the serenade last time out, preparations began for the next match by writing ‘Make us believe’ on the road outside of the players’ exit, but that wasn’t the only paintwork to be done in the build up.
On Wednesday morning four days before the big match, a statue of Sporting’s lion and club mascot was dumped in red paint in the middle of the night, a sign of aggression that didn’t go down well.
Sporting hit back with green paint over the home of Benfica’s ‘No Name Boys’ ultra group, but then sadly, things went way too far.
record.ptOtamendi was serenaded by fans as the realisation of the decider set in[/caption]
record.ptBut then the stone throwing went too far[/caption]
The day later saw a stabbing, with the president of the Sporting’s Setubal group, Mario Batista, showing the knife wound on his back to Record while alleging that it was done by Benfica fans, a depressing reminder of how football fans can boil over when tension reaches fever pitch.
The reality, though, is anticipation has never been higher for a Lisbon derby, and should either side get the win they deserve, the capital of Portugal will undoubtedly end up painted in either green or red.
