Hey, Captain Schmidt, your boat has sunk!

Calmly, the man sleeps while the storm adorns his boat. As a captain, he knows that he must be the last to abandon ship and, therefore, he is perhaps not very aware that he ends up, in the space of five days, against the same opponent, having thrown overboard the two most important tests of the season. football across borders. Someone to wake him up, if he finds it necessary, a captain like the captain of Rimbaud’s Drunken Boat. They knock on his door loudly and shout: “Hey, Captain Schmidt, your boat has sunk.” Bote is a nickname that fits this Benfica, which last season seemed like a battleship. Or canoe. Or, better yet: raft. Thus, made of random scraps like a contraption, to use an expression so fashionable in politics.

And yet, Benfica started the season well, winning the Super Cup against FC Porto, one of those games that they tend to lose. But it wasn’t the same Benfica that, in the previous season, surprised and excited us with superlatively dynamic football. It stopped being a team (of course, the departures of Grimaldo and Gonçalo Ramos were very notable, curiously because of everything the left-back attacked and everything the center-forward defended) and became a cluster of eleven players without knowing it. exactly what they were required to do on the pitch. In this regard, we must congratulate Herr Schmidt, a less than mediocre coach who created all that tactical chaos in which there are defensive midfielders and central defenders playing the role of left defenders, wingers swapping positions, midfielders without strength or rhythm and not even a striker to show for it.

The uselessness!

Having lost the Portuguese Cup and the championship to Sporting, this Benfica team must be classified, without a doubt, as one of the worst in its more than century-old history. Some will say, and I will not deny them the reason, that Captain Schmidt had to work with the people they put on board and that it is not his fault that he had too many lookouts in the crow’s nest and not even a pilot who could firmly put the hands on the helm. However, all information leads us to believe that the invention he named Kökçü was his choice, taking advantage of what he had seen him do in the Dutch championship when he coached PSV Eindhoven. It is natural that this is the case. He put his paw in the puddle, so to speak, forcing the club to spend around 20 million euros on an absolutely chilling nullity that never justified his place in the squad.

On the other hand, Dí Maria was an option for President Rui Costa, his teammate for years and he had a special appreciation for seeing him finish his career with the eagle shirt on his chest. Disastrous! Anyone who looks at the continued way in which the Argentine loses balls after balls and doesn’t make the slightest gesture to recover them, realizes that Di Maria didn’t come to end his career at Benfica because it was already over before arriving in Lisbon for the second time. .

Finally, look at the contraption that captain Schmidt, thanks to his broken football (the three in front are excluded from the process of recovering the ball) set up in the center of the field, especially from the moment he went to team B to get a bastard called João Neves and forced him to do a little bit of everything, from one goal to another, despite being only 19 years old and having to be protected as much as possible because he (and others like him) are the true future of Benfica. Unbalanced to the core, Captain Schmidt’s Drunken Boat is a bricolage between old and practically useless players (Di Maria and Otamendi, for example), others with no quality to wear that shirt (Cabral, Kökçü, Tengstedt), and finally those who need to be worked on in a winning atmosphere that this coach does not provide them (Bah, António Silva, João Neves, Marcos Leonardo).

After having thrown the boat into the bottom of the Atlantic that bathes Lisbon, Roger Schmidt is not even capable of being a cabin boy at Benfica and his maintenance in the position (he still has another year on his contract) would be a kind of announced suicide. Not only because of the modesty of his technical, tactical and even physical work but because of the way in which he is leading the crowds that follow Benfica to an idea of ​​satisfaction in the defeat that was, to say the least shocking, in the two games with Sporting, the fans left da Luz were happy for not having lost the game and Alvalade was extremely happy to have seen his team fight and to avoid, as they would certainly hope, not seeing them crushed as happened in Antas. This philosophy, which, I would say, is completely anti-Benfica, anti-everything represented by men of yesteryear who were ashamed of defeats, no matter how few they were, is yet another reason for this captain to leave once and for all command of a ship that it was always too big for him. The boat sank! How many times do I need to remind you? Perhaps he would benefit from a shower of humility and the dignity of realizing that one year to the next he transformed the Titanic into a kind of Kon-Tiki. With the difference that Kon-Tiki didn’t sink.