Benfica – Sporting: a derby for the Cup that could influence the derby for the championship

Can two derbies in the same week be different games? Yes and no. Connecting them is an inevitability, but this Tuesday’s game has the particularity of being a 90-minute second half that is worth a ticket to the Portuguese Cup final, a competition that Benfica hasn’t won since 2016/17 and Sporting since 2018/19.

On February 29, Rúben Amorim’s team went through like a storm in the 1st half, made it 2-0 at the start of the 2nd, only to be trapped by the reaction led by Ángel Di María. The numbers from the game tell us the story of why Sporting reached the second game, this Tuesday (8:45 pm, RTP1/Sport TV1), with an advantage that was too thin for what they produced in the first 60 minutes: the lions shot 19 times, above their average number of shots in I Liga games (16.5 shots according to Driblab), but they hit the target on just four occasions, below the average of 6.4 shots they register in league games. The effectiveness was scarce, despite the dominance.

Benfica, on the other hand, had a short reaction in the 2nd half as the path to effectiveness and to leaving the tie open. He scored for Aursnes and saw a goal disallowed by Di María. But the five shots in the game a month ago are light years away from the Reds’ average in the League (16.8). Of these, Benfica qualified three, naturally below the 6.6 average in the championship.

Looking at the two teams’ progress in the championship, the data is more equivalent than one would expect in offensive terms. In expected goals, Benfica has an average of 2.27xG, while Sporting has 2.01xG; In terms of the average number of passes made per shot, Roger Schmidt’s team needs 32.5 passes, while Sporting is slightly more objective, with 30.5 passes until the shot.