When was the last time Porto was booed off at home? It’s hard to recall, but at 9:40 p.m. local time on Wednesday, it didn’t feel like we were sitting in the home of the Liga and Europa League champion: unbeaten in 46 Liga matches stretching back to February 2010; still with a fighting chance in this season’s Champions League. It may be said that success breeds success, but it also builds expectation, impatience and fierce pressure, as the worm of turns with startling rapidity.
In the draw with an admirable and well-oiled APOEL, this was a pale, wan version of the Porto that inspired fear at home and abroad in 2010-11. “Unrecognizable” was the headline on the cover of Portuguese sports daily A Bola, which went on to describe this year’s vintage as “a sad caricature of the dominant team of last season.”
Worse still, the belief in the locker room seems genuinely dented. Emerging into the post-match mixed zone to talk to journalists dressed in their civilian clothes, these subdued players looked to a man like Clark Kent before his morning coffee. They seemed … normal, whereas under André Villas-Boas’s charge, they seemed superhuman, reducing a buoyant Benfica side to rubble.
Here, João Moutinho said “we’re not managing to work well as a team” – words that would have been unimaginable in the Villas-Boas era. There was always a buzz around last season’s team, which radiated noise, chatter and laughter. The team’s standard bearer, Moutinho’s assured control and encyclopedic passing range has been a key constituent of Porto’s power, but he was a shadow of his better self here, as he acknowledged.
News of the transfer of their former coach’s powers, as Villas-Boas’s Chelsea had earlier romped to merciless success over Genk (where even the prone Fernando Torres had made hay), hung heavy over the late evening atmosphere around the team's coaches. If this Champions League Group G has developed into the group of “death” that we all expected Group F (containing Arsenal, Marseille, Borussia Dortmund and Olympiakos) to be, it is because of general underachievement by its main contenders thus far.
FC Porto's James Rodriguez is help up by a APOEL defender during Wednesday's UEFA Champions League match in Portugal. APOEL earned a 1-1 draw, staying first in Group G. (Photo: Getty Images)
Porto president and arch-Machiavellian Jorge Nuno Pinto da Costa may see himself as the swaggering Puff Daddy of soccer club presidents, but he cuts the uncommonly sheepish air of having had one of his own rhymes played back to him for the first time right now. If he thought Porto was over the worst of its problems (“they wanted to put on a funeral for us…” he scoffed after the team ended its three-match winless run in the last Liga outing at Villas-Boas’ former club, Ácadémica), he may have to reconsider this morning.
He must be a loss to what he has done wrong, having seemingly ridden out the departure of Villas-Boas as smoothly as possible. Pinto da Costa appointed Villas-Boas’s assistant Vitor Pereira less than 24 hours after the boss left, retained most of the erstwhile coach’s backroom team, and spent a record €43 million ($59 million) on playing reinforcements this summer in a bid to circumvent a messy succession. Still against APOEL, it was about the left foot of Hulk, the hands of Helton and very little in between.
Maybe Pereira is daunted by the sheer scope of choice that lies before him, as he contemplates an even greater smorgasbord of talent than his predecessor had. He certainly seems baffled, as has become apparent over the last few days while he has come under intense scrutiny for his questionable decision to leave striker Walter out of his Champions League squad. The coach opted for Kléber, a fine prospect (as referenced by his recent Brazil call-up), but at 21 he is still green, and had no Champions League experience before this season. Meanwhile, those rehabilitated by Villas-Boas, including Fernando Belluschi, seem to be drifting back into obscurity.
The presidential formula for success is clear. Buy low, sell high. Regenerate, rotate. Unfortunately the manic trading neglects one important element - that of players coming through the club’s ranks. Bright talent such as André Castro (on loan at Sporting), Ukra and Hélder Barbosa (both at Braga) have been forced to leave to find opportunity. Barbosa has already scored four goals in this season’s Europa League, while Belgian club Standard Liege announced on Tuesday its intention to “take action” against Porto for non-payment of fee installments on summer purchases Steven Defour and Eliaquim Mangala.
Pinto da Costa fancifully suggested that another Porto native, Villas-Boas, had jumped ship to avoid his own confrontation with history, saying the “ghost of Mourinho” chased the 34-year-old out of the Dragão. In fact, it is the current man in charge who is sleeping with the light, gingerly drawing the proverbial bed sheet over his face. Portuguese soccer writer Ben Shave argued this week that Pereira is “not the leader of men that Villas-Boas was,” and the painful truth of this seeps out of every attempt by the coach to issue calming rhetoric.
Reflecting on a tight group after the game, Pereira said that it was “open” and that the four teams were “balanced”. A Bola columnist Vítor Serpa picked up on this. “Manifestly, you have to hope this isn’t the truth,” he wrote on Thursday. “If FC Porto have passed to being the equals of APOEL of Cyprus – with all the respect that teams all around the world deserve – then something has gone very wrong at Porto.”
For all APOEL’s progress under Ivan Jovanovic, this is the club that took the biggest-ever beating in UEFA club competition here in Portugal; 16-1 at Sporting of Lisbon, in the first round of the Cup Winners’ Cup back in November 1963. Only Manchester United has qualified for the group stage more times than Porto since the European Cup was reconstituted in its current format, back in 1992. This is not just about a slip from last season’s lofty standards. Everything about the club exudes expectation of excellence.
The news here of a presentation at the next Champions League home game, against Zenit in December, of a replica of the 1994 Portuguese Cup that will be auctioned for the late Sir Bobby Robson’s cancer charity, is just one reminder of the latent tradition at the club.
As Porto attempts to get back on the straight in narrow in Europe, it will go back to the drawing board domestically first. Liga results won’t make Pereira, but they could certainly break him.
