When Martin O’Neill says that you can often learn more from a defeat than a victory, as cliched as it’s become, he’s not wrong. Feyenoord put out a young side, we should of beaten them, we did. Benfica were a much tougher prospect and given the circumstances, they should probably have had the beating of us. They did. Comfortably. But did we learn anything?
Well, firstly, some perspective. Benfica are an extremely good team, they
Video of each of the goals in last night’s 4-1 loss to Benfica in the Guadiana Cup. (One video for each goal)
10′ David Luiz’s pile driver takes a wicked deflection to beat Brad Friedel.
36′ Franco Jara hits another big shot from distance, Friedel parries, but Saviola is smartly following up.
43′ Óscar Cardozo sticks an unstoppable free kick into the top corner.
49′ Franco Jara drags the ball back at the byline, beating Curtis Davies and cuts it back to Saviola to
Schooled.
Perhaps a little worse than I feared, but Benfica are a very good side and I figured they’d expose our weaknesses. Starting four forwards and a centre half with the ability to get forward like David Luiz, it was always going to be tough in the Algarve heat.
No excuses, we looked short on ideas, movement, quality, you name it. However, there aren’t too many sides in England that you could draw parallels to Benfica. Sure, we should
All the goals from last night’s Guadiana Cup match between Aston Villa and Feyenoord in the Algarve, plus the tie-breaking penalty shoot out which finished 4-4.
I’ll be back tonight with another live blog for the Benfica game, hopefully a little better prepared than last night when I missed Marc Albrighton’s screamer because I was under the impression the kick off was at 9.30pm… don’t know where I got that from… *cough* *cough* AVFC official site!!
Oh, speaking of the
Just a quick post as I’ve just got finished with the live blog. That would normally serve as a reasonably good account of the game, but unfortunately I was under the impression that this game kicked off at 9.30pm, so I missed the first few minutes, including a 35 yard screamer from Marc Albrighton, and spent most of the first half trying to catch up.
I did get to see Marc’s goal in the half time highlights and it was
I watched the opening game of the 2010 Guadiana Cup last night between hosts Benfica and Feyenoord which finished in a very entertaining 4-1 victory for the Portuguese side. They also followed that up with a 5-4 victory in a penalty shoot out.
Feyenoord opened the scoring just 3 minutes into the match with a breakaway goal that broke the offside trap laid by the extremely high Benfica backline and left a relatively simple finish one-on-one with Roberto in goal.
From
If you’re a Villa fan with a holiday in the Algarve booked around the end of July / beginning of August you just lucked out! The club have announced a couple of pre-season friendlies in Portgual as part of the Guadiana Cup; an annual mini-tournament hosted by Benfica.
The format varies, some years four teams have competed, others just three, it’s not unknown for it to feature only two. This summer it looks like it will be three, with Feyenoord