Former player and coach of the eagles, Álvaro Magalhães, champion in 2004/05 on Giovanni Trapattoni’s technical team, considers serious the content of the news about the break between the players and Jorge Jesus, like a revolt in the dressing room.
“It’s a very sad movie that’s going on, it’s not good. And as a football coach I wouldn’t want them to do the same to me. When the results are negative, the coach pays, but from what I have seen in the press, it was the players – and they are the ones who send the coaches away because they lose games, and sometimes there are games lost because they want it to be so – , from what I read were the players who pushed the coach away, who had been weakened since he arrived. And there was no one to stop it. The coach has responsibilities, he chose the squad, but Benfica only lost one competition, they still had the other three. And Benfica also went to Brazil to look for Jesus when he had a contract with Flamengo. There was no one to put the brakes on this, in the way that Rúben Amorim, for example, put a brake on Sporting», Álvaro Magalhães told A BOLA, without pausing: «Who fed this? The Coach? Someone from the structure? That’s the question I ask…»
Álvaro considers that all this happened “at a horrible moment” for Benfica. “But football has this, it’s unpredictable. Maybe on Thursday Benfica even plays a great game. New coach, new ideas, new system… Benfica, if they change the ‘chip’, can beat FC Porto», he stressed, returning to the beginning of the reasoning. “On the roster there are always one or two bad apples and we have to find them and shake them once and for all. If Pizzi lacked respect for the coach, he has to be removed from the group. But we don’t know what happened, if there was a lack of respect for the coach. It seems that there were also problems with Luisão. Trainer is for training and player for playing. If the players want to argue with the coach, they go home and bang their heads against the walls, but they have to respect the coach. What you read and hear is that it was the players who pushed Jesus away, “he concluded.
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