Sporting out of Europe, fury: “Football was cruel and unfair” | OneFootball

After travelling to Denmark and suffering a 4-1 thrashing in the first leg of the Europa Cup tie, Sporting’s women’s team hosted Brondby yesterday in Alcochete for the second leg, looking to wrap up the European tie.

Despite the difficulty of the match, coach Micael Sequeira never stopped stressing that he believed in a comeback and, consequently, in progressing to the next round. The fact is that the , was not enough to continue in this European competition.

With the elimination confirmed, Micael Sequeira highlighted that Sporting, over the course of the 2nd qualifying round, was hampered by a lack of luck: "In the first half we started the game very well and scored early. Brondby were fortunate in the way they got the equaliser and, at half-time, we talked and saw what needed improving in the second half. We ended up making it 2-1 and then I think the key moment of the game is the big chance in the 76th minute, when the ball doesn’t go in by 20 centimetres. It would have been 3-1 and we would have had 15 minutes until the end to try to level the tie. In these ties, football was very harsh and unfair to Sporting".

The coach also highlighted his players’ attitude in these two matches: "It was an excellent performance by the team, a good reaction. We only had 2 days of recovery to play against a team with this intensity. The team showed an excellent attitude in trying to take the tie to the very end."

To finish, Micael Sequeira said that they had “very bad luck in the draw”, since they came up against a “very strong opponent” at an early stage of the competition: "It’s true that we wanted to go further than we did in last season’s quarter-finals. We had an excellent campaign, but there’s no denying that we also didn’t have much luck in the draw. We had a very strong opponent.

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