"We want to move on"

PREVIEW

Bruno Lage wants Benfica to be at their “best in the Champions League” when they face Monaco on Tuesday, February 18, at 8 pm at the Estádio da Luz, in the second leg of the play-off for the knockout phase of the Champions League.

Given that Benfica are ahead in this tie, what kind of Monaco do you expect in the first few minutes? More attacking?

More important than “what kind of Monaco” is what kind of Benfica. It's a Benfica team that can't think about the two previous wins against Monaco, or about playing for the result, so our determination has to be to play a great game, to be at our best, at our best in the Champions League, and to get a result that allows us to move on in the competition. That's our goal, and it would be very important, both for us, because we'd be moving on, and for the club, because of the international prestige.

Before the game with Santa Clara you said that there were some players who were going to play on the edge. Who were those players?

At the limit... the fact that we don't have the minimum recovery time between games. As soon as you don't have that recovery time between games... playing is a risk for any player. Any player can get injured, if there's no recovery time, any player, whether from Benfica or any other team, national or international, is in a situation where they can, due to fatigue, too many games, an accumulated load, be subject to this. But I'm not going to specify, I'm not going to say anything specific about that.

You're not carrying your notebook today, but I'd like to ask you if, on one of the pages of your notebook - with so many competitions that Benfica has, and it's still in all of them, in fact - you've defined which competition you're going to give more priority to, given that you already have a lot of injured players in the squad.

We can't think of it like that. Regardless of whether I bring the notebook or not, there is a notebook that speaks louder than my notebook, which is the notebook since 1904, which tells us that Benfica must always give a good response at every moment, and the moment is the Champions League, and we have to present the best eleven to move on in the competition.

Is Tomás Araújo ready to be used? And, in that sense too, in the tactical scheme he used in the last game with Santa Clara, a different tactical scheme, at least in the positioning of some players, is it to be repeated in this game with Monaco, or not??

Tomás [Araújo] is available for the game, he trained with the team. We've repeated that tactical system many times in the past. So we can repeat it at any time, because we've repeated it several times in games since the beginning, since we've been here, even with Santa Clara, when we played the League Cup at home.

I know we're here previewing the Champions League, but on the last matchday Benfica once again depended solely on themselves to top the league. Has this scenario proved you right when, at a more delicate moment, you said that you were the solution and that you would be able to turn around a more complicated situation at the time?

The most important thing is what you've just said: we're dependent on ourselves, but the focus is totally on tomorrow's game [Tuesday].

I want to ask you about Benfica's attacking record. Because if they win tomorrow [Tuesday], they'll equal their best record in his second time at Benfica. If they win tomorrow, they'll have won six in a row, but the last four have also been by the narrowest of margins. Bruno Lage was a coach who got Benfica fans used to lots of goals in his first spell at Benfica. What has been missing in recent games, and what have you been doing in training to help Benfica score more goals?

The most important thing is for us to create chances, that's what we have to do, to keep motivating all our players and giving them the peace of mind they need. Do for the team, and that's what we've been doing, what we did with Pavlidis, and things will come naturally. What we can't give up is continuing to work.

There are things you can control and then there are things you can't control. Where were you when we felt the earthquake, before you came to speak [to the press], and what was going through your mind

If I tell you what I said to [Ricardo] Lemos... We were going up the stairs and we have a glass door. I heard the noise and told him: 'Look, we have to have the glass door fixed, it's already making a lot of noise...' It was only when I got here that I realized what had happened. Good question, that's the end of it, isn't it [laughs]? 

Benfica and Sporting are, among the teams that have progressed to the Champions League play-offs, among the most overloaded in Europe in terms of fixtures. They are also two teams that are being hit hard by injuries at the moment. I'm asking you if this is just unfortunate or if there's a cause-effect relationship between this overload and the injuries.

I think it's been across the board. Look, just now, in the Sport TV flash, I said that Fabrizio Romano [an Italian journalist], between January and February, there have been more injuries than new signings, so it's been an across-the-board thing.