Victoria, the resident eagle who holds the job of Benfica mascot, has been tested for avian flu and, to the club’s relief, found healthy. So she is free to flutter her wings and swoop, as usual, before kick-off at a sold-out Estadio da Luz on Wednesday.
As for the club’s remaining predators and flyers, no immediate diagnosis is possible. Benfica’s list of injured looks so like a contagion it’s a wonder head coach Ronald Koeman hasn’t called back the vets to examine his players.
That is unless he’s calling Manchester United’s bluff. Koeman headed to Madeira for yesterday’s domestic engagement with Maritimo without his captain, Simao Sabrosa, Italian international striker Fabrizio Miccoli, Greek midfield player Giorgios Karagounis, Portuguese starlet Manuel Fernandes, and Brazilian winger Geovanni. That’s five of Benfica’s best front six players. Of those, only Geovanni is officially given a good chance of being available for the make-or-break meeting with United, although word is that Simao came through a training session on Friday. Benfica last night recorded their first win in seven matches. In the Champions League so far they have recorded a single triumph, on the opening day, although the crabby character of Group D means the distances between best and worst are so tight that the Portuguese champions, bottom of the pool, will make the next round if they beat United.
Benfica’s three goals from five matches, meanwhile, make them the most prolific of all the group’s tenants. The equations governing Wednesday’s collision ought to oblige them to push forward and, at full strength, they have goals in them. Nuno Gomes, the centre-forward, leads the Portuguese Superleague’s goalscorers by some distance, though he would want to have his best companions with him for United. Simao and Miccoli are important to how inventively Benfica attack, as Koeman acknowledges.
It is a match that has assumed the quality of a knockout, a draw being no guarantee to either team. So it is that Koeman, 42, finds himself cast in a role familiar to anybody drawn to crux nights for British football: the would-be spoiler of the ambitions of teams from our islands.
Reminded of his place in England’s folklore, the Dutchman tends to narrow his eyes and allow himself a thin smile before declining too long a journey back down memory lane to the famous 1993 World Cup qualifier in Rotterdam. He played the protagonist, first for appearing to foul David Platt on the edge of the penalty area and somehow escaping dismissal, and then for scoring the goal that prevented England reaching the finals. Irish supporters may also recall the Koeman miskick, converted by Wim Kieft, that stopped Ireland making the semi-finals of the 1988 European championship.
As a player, he was imposing in attack and defence, a confident distributor and one of the finest converters of a dead ball of his time. Sir Alex Ferguson, the United manager, will remember how large a part Koeman played in his preparations for two of United’s landmark nights in Europe during the early 1990s. The Holland international hit the peaks of his club career at Barcelona, and Ferguson certainly identified Koeman as the key individual when he took United to Rotterdam to meet the Spanish team in the final of the 1991 Cup Winners’ Cup.
“Their main objective was to create the extra man in midfield by having Koeman break out from the back,” Ferguson wrote in his autobiography. “To offset Koeman’s threat, I told Brian McClair to play in behind Mark Hughes and be ready to choke Koeman’s space if he broke, thus reducing the scope for his exceptional passing.”
He was gratified that for most of the contest, the strategy rendered “Koeman’s attempts to come out from the back ineffective”. United scored twice, Barça were beaten, although the Dutchman would not remain entirely quiet. He scored with a free kick 11 minutes from time.
The following year, a Koeman free kick would win Barcelona the European Cup at Wembley. Three seasons later, he was on Ferguson’s mind again. United met Barcelona in the Champions League, drew 2-2 at Old Trafford and visited the Nou Camp for the return. The night finished 4-0 to Barcelona.
Koeman was by then ready to do some tactical thinking of his own, and after periods as assistant coach at Barcelona and in charge of Vitesse Arnhem he took on Ajax Amsterdam, with considerable success.
He drew wide admiration for his methods of working with a young team and had the feather in his cap of a stirring European Cup campaign in 2003 that had them within minutes of making the semi-finals.
The following season, though, the team begin to drift, and Koeman’s ascendancy as a young, wanted coach suffered its first dip. Where it had been assumed he would one day be appointed as head man at Barcelona it became clear he would need a detour first. Hence Portugal, and the country’s most fabled club.
Koeman joined Benfica in the summer, and took on an assignment that was never going to lend him great margin for error. Benfiquistas were celebrating their first league title for 11 years, led there by the departed veteran Italian head coach Giovanni Trapattoni. Defending the championship has proved taxing and a position of sixth in the Superleague at the beginning of December is something of an anti-climax. Koeman’s chief alibis are the injuries. “In the last month, ” he explains, “we have had so many players out, and that’s bound to have a negative effect on our results. ”
Koeman was obliged, for instance, to field a teenaged goalkeeper, Rui Nereu, in the Champions League after he had barely made his domestic debut. First-choice keeper Quim Manuel is fit again, but the scarcity of cover explains Benfica’s interest in Jerzy Dudek, unused at Liverpool. Koeman experienced several frustrations in the summer transfer market, although he might count himself lucky that he didn’t lose his best footballer, and that Simao is still with the club. He had all but checked in for a flight to Liverpool in late August until Benfica’s directors had a change of heart about the sale of their skipper. Simao’s admirers at Anfield are still there and the player’s future after January could yet hinge on whether Benfica remain in the European Cup.
Far beyond the implications of defeat for the ambitions and economies of either club, Benfica against United is a resonant fixture for its ancient history, remembered more poignantly for the passing of George Best. Best was the principal figure on the night that Benfica, twice European champions and twice more losing finalists in the first half of the 1960s, lost their unbeaten record in Europe at the Estadio da Luz. It was 1966 and they were fabulously prolific, so much so that United had been counselled to defend cautiously a 3-2 lead from the Old Trafford leg when they went to Lisbon for the second match of their quarter-final. So cautiously that within 12 minutes, Best had scored twice. United won 5-1 on the night.
Then there was 1968, at Wembley, the European Cup final, and a 4-1 win for the United of Best, Bobby Charlton and Nobby Stiles against the Benfica of Eusebio. It would be 20 years before Benfica made it to another final, 31 before United did, and if there’s little comparison on whom the forces of modern football financing has exerted the greater gravitational pull — Benfica are a big club in a small country and suffer for it — neither team’s present condition gives off much brilliance set next to the champions of old.
