"I feel the team is very confident"

PREVIEW

Launching the first leg of the Champion League play-off between Monaco-Benfica, scheduled for 8 pm on Wednesday, February 12, Bruno Lage expressed his confidence in combining a good display with a good result and taking the final match to the Estádio da Luz.

Now that it's a two-legged play-off, I ask you: which Monaco do you expect tomorrow [Wednesday, February 12]?

I expect the same team. Very competent, a team with enormous quality, strong physically, with enormous technical quality, with a lot of youngsters with a very strong dynamic up front. That's why I'm expecting a difficult game, a game similar to the previous one in the first phase. Now, of course, with the difference that, at this stage, it's a knockout, there are two games. What we want is to play a great game, get a result, and the tie will certainly be decided at the Estadio da Luz.

I'm not going to reproduce your speech at the end of the game here, against Monaco, but I will remind you that you said you had faith in all the players, in the team, that the players who came off the bench were decisive and that Benfica would have a great season. Not with those words, of course. Is that the message you're giving Benfica before this match, after that other one, which was a hard-fought victory?

Regardless of the words, the most important thing is my message. One thing is when I'm talking to the players, in the emotion of talking to them, and the other is the language of the dressing room. And I know perfectly well what locker room language is, because I practically grew up in a locker room. My father was a coach, so I know almost everything about a dressing room. Regarding the message, the message was at the moment, it was in the moment of victory, and at the moment when I felt what the team could do. I'd been working for a little over two months, and I felt that this victory was very important, given the way the game went. I remember that it was a game with several twists and turns, with goals disallowed on both sides, and I felt that these victories sometimes give you even more confidence for the work ahead. And so it was. Right now, we're in a good position, we've already won a title, and we're now at this stage of the Champions League. We had a run of 13 points, the past is the past, what matters is that we come here with the same determination and ambition. I feel the team is very confident, you've just seen the way Pavlidis spoke, the team is determined to have a good season, it's determined to have a good game, and that's the most important thing, that's the focus of tomorrow's game [Wednesday]. I'm reinforcing, we're going to play a great team, a team that plays a very physical game, but with a lot of technical quality, a lot of speed, a lot of interior movement and opportunity, and we have to be at our best. We have to be careful so that we too can play a great game. Knowing when to defend, knowing when to attack, creating chances, knowing how to have that killer mentality that when you have to kill the game off, you have to score, and you have to close the game out. That's what I'm aiming for and that's what we're going to do on the pitch.

At Adi Hütter's press conference today [Tuesday] morning, he gave the odds in favor of Benfica, above all because of the experience the team has. I asked him if he shared the same opinion as the Monaco coach.  And then, somehow, the coach also spoke a lot about the refereeing in the first game, still in the first phase. In some ways, he was critical of the refereeing in that game. And what I'm asking you is whether you think that's pressure for this game, for the refereeing team for this game, and whether that could turn against Benfica.

Look, on the subject of refereeing, I've played against the Monaco coach twice. Or, rather, three times. We've played three times, we're playing the fourth tomorrow, so I don't talk about refereeing. But I have a good memory. As for the game, I think it's 50-50 at this stage of the competition. We know Monaco are a great team. We won the game in the first phase. It's a different type of competition now. We have to play a good game tomorrow, get a good result and decide the tie at Estádio da Luz. 

On the subject of the right-back, I would ask you whether Leandro Santos is fully guaranteed to fill in for Tomás Araújo until the end of the season. And another question, Di María missed the last game due to a muscular problem... Is he fit? He was decisive in the last game here, with two assists. Do you think his experience will be an asset for Benfica tomorrow?

Of course. I have a lot of confidence in Leandro, and of course Di María. He's with us, he'll be training soon. And, of course, the experience he has, especially in these big games... Just kidding, but it's often said that he always scores in the decisive games, in the big finals he always scores, so he's a very important player for any team.

Vangelis Pavlidis, who has been scoring a lot of goals in recent weeks, was here with us. What has changed in this period for him to start scoring so much?

Nothing has changed. As he [Pavlidis] just said, the first thing is to always be available to help the team. It's his job, as the team's spearhead, to score goals, that's the goal he came with, that's the goal he's had since day one, and nothing has changed. Both he and the other strikers work hard to help the team. What we want from the strikers, as he also said, is much more than scoring goals. Of course scoring goals is important, but it's much more than scoring goals. He's been doing that, and I'm going to borrow a question from a colleague of yours, because it was a question of scoring goals. Because the work he's been doing for the team, both in terms of defensive organization, the way we press and the assists for goals, has been very important, and now, of course, he's experiencing a very good moment. We hope that tomorrow [Wednesday] he can continue that momentum.