FC Porto beat Midtjylland at home, 2-0, in matchday six of the Europa League and rose to the 18th position of the league table, with eight points, just three behind the eighth place, which guarantees direct qualification to the Round of 16. After the victory that “should have had more goals”, Vítor Bruno stated that “the team understood well what was asked for in a game against an opponent who has had a beautiful path in the Europa League”, managing to “disarm it" and being "three points away from the direct qualification”.

Short victory
“I said that it was important to attack the game from the beginning, with maximum responsibility. We had to understand what the game represented at this stage of the Europa League, and we knew we had to recover from the situation we put ourselves in, and that's what we did. The team went in well, strong, dominant, controlling, managing spaces very well, doing it at the right times. We scored the goal, then the opponent had a play in which they could tie, but otherwise they were harmless, they didn't get close to our goal thanks to what the players did, as they realised what they had to do to face a very closed opponent from the middle. We realized what paths we had to take to find the opponent's goal, we did that in the second half too, when we started looking for the second goal, We could have scored a third and fourth, we could have scored five or six goals, and it would have been normal. The only other issue is that the victory was short.”

Strategic team
“When we decide a team to the game, it has a lot to do with the daily performance and the strategic side of the game. We understood that it was a way to hurt the opponent, starting with Galeno in that space. It has nothing to do with the performance of Moura, who has been doing very well and had a fantastic performance, but we felt that the game asked for different things in Nico's absence. I tried to understand who could carry the ball and force the opponent to run. That's what they did and they did it well, we later sent in people with the same profile with the ball, and the players understood it; Jaime, as soon as he went in, created a play with Samu in the front of goal. The team understood well what was asked for in a game against an opponent who has had a beautiful trajectory in the Europa League, but we managed to disarm them and create goal plays to get a result that was not this.”

Excellent work
“It's not about nerves, but about a moment the opponent exploits, and that they feel is an important moment. We are talking about a squad of 28 players, in which 22 are over 180 centimetres and this is not by chance. We knew about that, we worked on set pieces, throw-ins, corners, free kicks, the team was practically excellent, the goal they scored was disallowed by offside and by the work of our defensive line coming up.”

In search of perfection
“The victory means three points, we have eight at the moment, we are three away from the qualification, and it means arriving at Olival tomorrow and looking at Monday's game. We don't want to replicate what we did today, there's always room for improvement and we want to be nearly perfect.”