Portugal
Primeira Liga
Saturday 30th November 2019
Kick Off 18.00. On Time !
Sport Lisboa Benfica 4 Club Sport Maritimo 0, attendance 52,772
9’ 1-0
17’ 2-0
31’ 3-0
55’ 4-0
@ Estádio do Sport Lisboa e Benfica
Rua Jose Maria Nicolau
1500-374
Lisboa
€30 Admission
No Programme
As with Sporting Clube Portugal, Sport Lisboa Benfica was another club that built a new ground to host matches in the Euro 2004 Championships and again it was built next door to the previous one. In this case the old ground had been the Estádio da Luz, which at one time had a capacity of 120,000, but was down to around 78,000 when I visited on 3rd November 2001, when I saw Sport Lisboa Benfica draw 0-0 with Vitória Sport Club Guimaraes in a Primeira Liga match in front of a crowd of 46,200.
The new stadium has an all seated capacity of 65,647 and is easily reached by using the Lisbon Metro, taking the green line to Alto dos Moinhos station, where the ground is 300-400 yards walk from. Tickets for this match were more of a problem, as the on-line sales would not accept the passport numbers in order to purchase tickets to print at home, so they were bought from the club ticket office at the stadium on Thursday afternoon. It was also difficult to find two seats together, with just two sections of seating offering this, but there were thousands of empty seats (and I mean, thousands!) all round the ground on match night in every single section.
The match was 1st versus 14th in the league table and unfortunately, as a neutral, went totally to form. Benfica scored early on through Pizzi, although we had a ridiculous wait of almost three minutes before VAR finally awarded the goal. The home fans were not impressed, even though the decision went their way. It is the first time I have been at a ‘live’ match where VAR has been in use and it is absolutely pathetic how long it takes them to make a decision and this sort of thing will really kill the atmosphere at matches if they don’t sort it out.
By halftime it was 3-0, with Brazilian striker Carlos Vinicius scoring twice. Early in the second half he completed his hat trick (although one of these has now been awarded as an own goal on the league website) with all three goals scored from inside the six yard box, as was the opener from Pizzi. Maritimo were really poor and offered nothing in the way of resistance. Benfica didn’t have to do much to stroll to an easy three points. Even when Gabriel was sent off for Benfica on the hour mark, for picking up a second yellow card, Maritimo looked no better with a man advantage.
Getting away from the ground after the match was only slightly slower than at Sporting Clube on Thursday evening, as the first train was rammed full, meaning a seven minute wait for the next one.
