Benfica 4 Real Madrid 2: Goalkeeper Anatoliy Trubin scores as Mourinho’s side dump Madrid into the play-offs
Goalkeeper Anatoliy Trubin scored a remarkable stoppage-time goal to claim a 4-2 win for Benfica against Real Madrid — sending Jose Mourinho’s side through to the play-offs as they condemned his former side to that additional knockout stage.
A frantic night at a rain-soaked Estadio da Luz began with Benfica putting heavy pressure on Madrid, with an overturned penalty for Mourinho’s side in the 16th minute before Gianluca Prestianni saw a curling effort tipped over the bar by Thibaut Courtois.
Inevitably, however, it was Kylian Mbappe who put Madrid ahead in the 30th minute, heading home from a Raul Asencio cross for the Frenchman’s record-breaking 12th goal of this league phase. But Asencio then slipped in the 36th minute, with Madrid’s defence all at sea, to allow Vangelis Pavlidis to cross and Andreas Schjelderup to draw Benfica level.
Alvaro Arbeloa’s side were weak in defence, with Federico Valverde forced to clear off the line and Leandro Barreiro heading a fine chance wide from a corner. Benfica’s persistence finally paid off before half-time, as the Portuguese side won a penalty for Aurelien Tchouameni’s tug of Nicolas Otamendi’s shirt. Pavlidis made no mistake from the spot, sending the stadium wild.
Madrid looked short on ideas, and they were punished further in the 54th minute, when Schjelderup lashed home after turning Asencio inside-out and slotting home.
Mbappe pulled a goal back in the 58th minute from Arda Guler’s low cross, and it seemed as if Madrid would go through even with a defeat — but a late Sporting CP goal at Athletic Club changed everything. Suddenly, Arbeloa’s team had been nudged into the additional play-off round, while Benfica needed just a goal to reach that stage on goal difference.
Asencio and Rodrygo were both sent off for second yellow cards in stoppage time and everyone held their breath with games across the continent having ended — the second half in Lisbon had kicked off late after multiple stoppages in the first period.
Then, in the dying stages, Benfica won a free kick and Trubin went up. The 24-year-old Ukrainian keeper sent a header past Courtois — and capped the maddest of Champions League nights.
Here, Jack Lang, Nick Miller and Conor O’Neill analyse what just took place.
What just happened?!
Football. Stupid football. Stupid, crazy, delirious football. Don’t try and pin it down. It will wriggle free in new ways. It doesn’t obey.
This was a strange game in about four different ways. Benfica were amazing but spent most of the second half missing chances and looking weirdly doomed, regret on pre-order with the cosmic supermarket. Madrid were poor but in an incredibly shrugging way, until 87 minutes, when goals elsewhere suddenly pushed them out of the top eight.
That sent Madrid on the attack and decreased the chances of Benfica getting the goal they needed. Or at least that was the obvious reading. It looked like it was going one of two ways: mutual disappointment pact or Madrid getting out of jail. Then, with a nod of Trubin’s head, another world opened up on a soaking Lisbon night.
There were always going to be contrasting levels of motivation here, but the gulf between the two sides throughout was surprising. Benfica were a riot in red and white; Madrid were not so much outplayed as trampled into the dirt.
Prestianni, 19 going on 11, was mesmeric. So was Heorhiy Sudakov, pulling the strings with languid elegance. Fredrik Aursnes and Schjelderup never stopped running. More than anything, they all played with knife-between-the-teeth intensity, roared on by a fervent Lisbon crowd.
Madrid’s defending was largely hypothetical. Raul Asensio gifted the meme crowd a lovely slapstick moment in the run-up to Schjelderup’s first goal, stumbling around like a drunken uncle. He was culpable for Benfica’s knockout third, too, simply letting Schjelderup dribble around him, a training cone with a pulse.
He was not the only one not at the races. Tchouameni yanked Otamendi’s shirt to give away a daft penalty. Alvaro Carreras spent most of the first hour about 16 kilometres out of possession, watching through binoculars as Sudakov, Prestianni and Amar Dedic took turns to raid down his flank. He was great for Benfica last season and was great for them again tonight.
That Madrid stayed in the match at all owed much to their own clinical finishing and the brilliance of Courtois. Benfica, though, should have been out of sight long before Mbappe’s second goal. Pavlidis, Leandro Barreiro, Dedic, Schjelderup and Sudakov all squandered good chances.
That was the pattern as the minutes ticked down, until circumstances shook Madrid into belated life. Then, when glory looked further away than it had all evening, Benfica did the unthinkable.
Jack Lang
How did it go down in the stadium?
The Benfica players and coaching staff didn’t realise.
The fans inside the Estadio da Luz did, though.
It was deep, deep, deep into injury time and Trubin was taking his time over a free kick way in his own half. He must have wondered why the crowd was screaming at him to get the ball forward as quickly as possible. The score was 3-2, it seemed like they were holding onto an unlikely win.
But word seemed to have got around the stadium that the ‘as it stands’ table had Benfica in 25th place, just one goal shy of Marseille in the final playoff spot. All the other games had finished.
Eventually, someone told the bench. And they started to go mad, hopping around, screaming at Trubin to hurry up. Which he did, and eventually they won a free kick on the right.
Benfica’s players mob Anatoliy Trubin (Patricia de Melo Moreira/ AFP via Getty Images)
Mourinho waved Trubin forwards. They definitely knew now. But it was the 97th minute: surely the goalkeeper couldn’t change things at the other end of the pitch?
But he rose like Robert Lewandowski and headed home. Chaos. The stands erupted. Everyone started running in different directions. The bench and coaching staff spilled onto the pitch. Mourinho bolted off to the left, away from where the goal went in. He grabbed a ballboy and half-carried him along. Astonishing. The steel girders of the stadium shook.
Benfica’s season would have been over if they’d gone out. It isn’t now.
Nick Miller
All eyes on Mourinho
It is pretty hard not to just watch Jose Mourinho when you are at one of his games, even when you know you are supposed to be watching the actual football.
For the majority of the first half, he shifted between sitting on the bench and pacing his technical area with his hands shoved in his pockets, trying to appear calm and composed, but not really succeeding. He looked like a man who had recently been diagnosed with high blood pressure, whose doctor had ordered him not to get too excited, only for his true nature to defy medical advice.
Maybe that is why he seems to have largely outsourced complaints against the officials these days, with his team of assistants entrusted with the responsibility of haranguing the referee and/or the fourth official.
(Filipe Amorim/AFP via Getty Images)
But then there are some occasions when he just could not help himself. Like when the first penalty awarded to Benfica was overturned by VAR, the tables turned and a couple of those assistants had to hold the former Real Madrid manager back from charging onto the pitch and… well, who knows what he would have done.
He did not really celebrate either of Benfica’s goals in the first half, staying in the dugout while everyone else went wild. But immediately after Pavlidis scored the second from the penalty spot, he dashed up the line, furiously pointing at his watch, demanding the half be brought to a close that instant. He then disappeared down the tunnel before the whistle was actually blown.
The delays in the first half were such that the second kicked off a good five minutes after every other game: was that the result of two penalties being awarded, one chalked off after a lengthy VAR check and a decent scuffle after the other, a series of injuries and assorted other delays? Or was it the Mourinho effect? With anyone else, the answer is certainly the former, but with Mourinho, you do still half-think he could have manifested all of this.
Even his most ardent fanboys cannot argue he is the force he once was, but it is still difficult to take your eyes off him.
Nick Miller
Is Ronaldo’s single-season record under threat?
Mbappe is bearing down on Cristiano Ronaldo’s record of 17 goals in a single Champions League campaign.
Ronaldo set that in 2013-14, while playing for Real Madrid, and Mbappe is now only four behind on 13. He opened the scoring here with a precise header, steering Asencio’s cross home on the half-hour mark.
Ronaldo would undoubtedly point to the Champions League’s expansion last season, with the group stage (now known as the league phase) rising from six to eight games, which gives the France captain more chances to catch up to his Portuguese idol. But, even allowing for that, Mbappe is keeping pace.
After eight matches of that 2013-14 campaign, Ronaldo had 13 goals, just one more than Mbappe’s current total, before he added four more between the quarter-finals and the final.
Mbappe’s finishing has been predictably clinical. The shotmap below shows that he has turned 5.3 expected goals from open play into 10 actual goals. If Arbeloa guides Madrid all the way to the final, he will need just five goals in nine games (including the additional play-off round) to break the record.
And Mbappe has already shown just how quickly he can close that gap. He scored seven goals across two Champions League matches this season — four away at Olympiacos and a hat-trick against Kairat on matchday two. Ronaldo’s record looks shakier than ever.
Conor O’Neill
What did Mourinho say?
“It was normal to get emotional with the fourth goal,” Mourinho told Spanish TV station Movistar. “I believe it was deserved, really deserved. Kylian had two chances, scored two goals. Otherwise the result would be different. For Benfica it is an incredible prestige to beat Real Madrid, it hasn’t happened since the historic finals between the teams so many years ago.
“When I made the last changes, I thought we were qualified, at 3-2, to hold on. A few seconds later I was told no, so I put Otamendi into attack and we had the chance at a dead ball. Trubin is two metres tall. It was a fantastic goal, a historic goal, the stadium nearly fell down. But it was very deserved for us tonight.
“I know now in the next round we get either Real Madrid or Inter. I can’t say which I prefer as I like to visit Madrid, I never go, and I like to visit Milan and I never go. To see friends like today is always a pleasure. And obviously Madrid and Inter are teams who can win the Champions League. We are a team who, at most, can do something incredible like we did tonight.”
What did Arbeloa say?
“It’s not the first time a goalkeeper has scored against me,” Arbeloa told his post-match press conference. “They had to take a risk, we were two players down and we needed to score to be in the top eight. They had to take risks, so did we, and they won.
“Today we were far from what we wanted to be, from the difficulty of the game, the opponent, the atmosphere, what they were playing for, what we were playing for too. We weren’t able to perform at the level we needed to for 90 minutes. Before coming here, we knew we had a lot of work to do, and we’re still aware that we have a lot to do. We have to look ahead to the Rayo (Vallecano) game (on Sunday in La Liga). To win these kinds of games, you have to do a lot of things right, a lot, not just one, for 90 minutes.
“I am ultimately responsible. I also said it in Albacete (when they were defeated by the second-division side in the Copa del Rey) and I repeat: I am ultimately responsible. And it’s not that we’ve been eliminated from the Champions League, far from it.”
What’s next?
The draw for the February play-offs (involving the teams that finished ninth to 24th in the table) will be held on Friday, January 30 from 11am GMT (6am ET).
How the night unfolded across the continent
With the top two, Arsenal and Bayern Munich, already qualified, Real Madrid, Liverpool and Tottenham Hotspur in third to fifth had the points advantage in the top eight before kick-off, with the knowledge that a win would secure automatic qualification.
Liverpool and Tottenham beat Qarabag and Eintracht Frankfurt respectively. Sporting CP’s added-time winner from substitute Alisson Santos took them into the top eight at the expense of Madrid.
Lots of eyes were on the teams who started the night from sixth to 13th place, as they were all tied on points. Those teams were Paris Saint-Germain, Newcastle United and Chelsea, who occupied the last three spots in the top eight, and Barcelona, Sporting, Manchester City, Atletico Madrid and Atalanta.
PSG and Newcastle United were facing each other, meaning a spot was always potentially going to open up in the top eight and ultimately their draw meant they both now have to face a play-off.
Four of the eight teams on 13 points before tonight’s won (Barcelona, Manchester City, Chelsea and Sporting) and all of them ended up in the top eight — at the expense of PSG, Newcastle, Real Madrid and Atalanta.
Barcelona first entered the top eight on the hour-mark after overturning a one-goal deficit against Copenhagen, while Manchester City took a two-goal lead within half an hour at home to Galatasaray. Chelsea dipped in and then out, then finally back in the top eight after a rollercoaster 3-2 win in Naples.
In the battle for the play-off places, Club Brugge overtook Marseille by beating them 3-0, as the French club missed out on 24th by one goal. Bodo/Glimt recorded another impressive victory by beating Atletico 2-1 to finish 23rd and grab a play-off, while Pafos and USG both, like Marseille, finished on nine points but were eliminated.
Eduardo Tansley
Key dates
Play-offs: February 17-18 and 24-25Round of 16: March 10-11 and 17-18Quarter-finals: April 7-8 and 14-15Semi-finals: April 28-29 and May 5-6Final: May 30
