Augusto Inácio blames Varandas at Sporting for Porto's success: It fed... | OneFootball

The speech by Frederico Varandas after the first-leg match of the Portuguese Cup against Porto, on March 3, in which he accused André Villas-Boas of “being afraid” and said the rival could not win the championship “11 against 11.” Augusto Inácio believes these words spurred on the blue-and-white team.

“So wasn’t it President Frederico Varandas who said that Sporting were going to be three-time champions and that Porto were afraid and that Porto play no football? Frederico Varandas kept feeding Porto’s ambition with those words,” he began by saying in an interview with the newspaper A Bola.

The former Lions coach said this was an easy scenario to foresee. “Only those who do not know that club fail to understand that every time people talk like that, they only grow stronger. And of course they make even more of it, because that is a way of motivating themselves for the difficult matches that Porto also have,” he stressed.

Augusto Inácio also said that the speech weighed negatively on the Lions. “Still regarding President Frederico Varandas’ words, the one who ended up under more pressure was Sporting, who had to win every match, because Porto were leading the championship and, in fact, gave them no chance,” he said.

To conclude, the national champion in 1999/2000 highlighted the poor physical state of the Sporting players. “Sporting reach this decisive stage of the season, I believe, with everyone already thinking ‘let this end now, we want to go on holiday,’ because the players are completely exhausted, as people usually say in football slang’,” he concluded.

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