Rui Borges confirms more Sporting starters will miss the next match | OneFootball

After being eliminated in the semi-finals of the League Cup, Rui Borges was present in the press room at Estádio Dr. Magalhães Pessoa to analyze the match against Vitória de Guimarães (2-1 defeat). The coach expressed his disappointment with the loss and confirmed the injuries of Eduardo Quaresma and Fotis Ioannidis for Sporting's next match.

"It's difficult. It's something that seems worth studying. Today, for the first time, I feel—and I believe the team feels it too—that no matter how optimistic we are, it's hard to see so many people out, injured. This is not an excuse, mind you, in a game where we could have made it 2-0, but the opponent kept believing in stoppage time and got lucky. That's all there is to it." he began by saying.

The coach believes the team will bounce back: "There is daily pressure at Sporting, regardless of whether or not we achieve our goals and results. The pressure is to be better and to win. More than the results, I believe that everything that has happened affects the players. We, as the coaching staff, have to find a way to lift them up. We have to move forward and focus on what's left to play this season: the entire second half is still ahead and we have to do better than in the first, because only then can we achieve our goals."

Rui Borges refuses to use injuries as an excuse for the elimination: "It's not the muscle injuries that have kept the players out. As optimistic as I am and as much as I try not to cling to that, my greatest sadness is leaving here today without two players for the next match. It gets to a point where it's impossible not to feel it. But we don't actually have that many muscle injuries. They're mostly traumatic, things that just happen and we have to move on."

The coach admitted some fatigue among the players and addressed the transfer market: "There's accumulated fatigue, you can feel it, and today it was noticeable in the team's collective energy. So many injuries should be a case study. It's unbelievable, I don't know what else could happen to us. New players? Sporting lives off its youth academy and if we have to rely on them, we will. We can't just go to the market 'like this', otherwise in two months we'll have forty players to train. We have to be cautious and assess if there's a specific need, but we'll always turn to our academy," he pointed out.

This article was translated into English by Artificial Intelligence. You can read the original version in 🇵🇹 here.