Nuno Raposo points to Sporting's weakest link: patience runs out | OneFootball

Rui Borges has been the target of criticism following the team’s start in the league. The draw against Estrela da Amadora and the hard-fought win over Vitória de Guimarães have fueled Sporting fans’ anger toward the Mirandela-born coach. Nuno Raposo even goes as far as to argue that the manager is Sporting’s “weakest link”.

"Rui Borges is currently the weakest link at Alvalade. Neither the president nor the club structure are as much in the sights of those fans who never set foot in Alvalade and the 50,000 who, despite that, keep showing up. The signs are that the fan base will not have the patience that a team in transition would need, hence the urgency of delivering a consistent 90-minute performance," he wrote in his opinion piece for newspaper A BOLA.

The journalist from the same outlet recalled the end of last season. "Rui Borges is at this moment the most under-pressure coach in the league. Pressure that is not unrelated to the humiliating defeat in the Portuguese Cup final at the hands of a very worthy Torreense from Liga 2. What weighs from last season was not so much the failure to win a third straight title, softened by direct qualification for the Champions League, but rather the Jamor failure, which was being forgotten because of the transfer market and the pre-season matches but resurfaced immediately after the first draw and with the performances that followed two comfortable leads on the scoreboard, one lost and the other almost so…," he stressed.

To conclude, Nuno Raposo warns that Rui Borges could be sacked if these performances become a pattern. "The question has been the same since December 2024: Rui Borges’s ability to be great. He has already shown that he is capable of it, because anyone who does what Sporting did in the last Champions League can only be great, but there is no patience that can withstand so many squandered leads... Nor any coach who can survive if that becomes a pattern", he concluded.

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