27 minutes ago, axman2526 said:

Designed to assist the Portuguese side perhaps?

I'm not sure about that. While I'm still very much not taking it for granted the biggest worry I had about this tie was us playing at The Dragao.

Taking home advantage away plays into our hands more i feel.

40 minutes ago, Argo said:

I'm not sure about that. While I'm still very much not taking it for granted the biggest worry I had about this tie was us playing at The Dragao.

Taking home advantage away plays into our hands more i feel.

They get 30 more minutes for away goals if we go to extra time while not being away. It helped them against Juve even though that game was in Turin I believe.

We were right to be excited about our chances after all

Edited June 2, 20215 yr by Scott Harris

Very much nitpicking here but I would have appreciated if they'd have kept their iPhones outta the celebration. Tammy was especially in love with it. Probably didn't get the memo.

 

On 02/06/2021 at 16:59, Scott Harris said:

We were right to be excited about our chances after all

Rightly so^ and I don't think anyone can say despite our optimism we had a easy run.

The group stage may have been favourable but, that's it after that we faced very good teams.

Athletico>Porto>Madrid>City☆ are top tier opponents not one of those teams finished below 2nd in their domestic leagues. With 2 out of the 4 teams we faced in the KO winning their respective leagues. 

I don't think its bias or an exaggeration to say we were the best team in the competition. Sometimes the underdog wins a tournament and it undermines their achievement. Not in this case we outplayed every team we faced and the only loss came from a wonder goal when we had pretty much wrapped up the contest.

We may have struggled to score goals but we made chances throughout the season and were very hard to break down. 'The best offense is a good defense' rang true for us. Now we need to continue having the best defense and look to make our attack even better.

Edited June 3, 20215 yr by LongtimerLurker

Never thought we'd pull it off, but I did always believe in the right circumstances we could do serious damage in the knockout stages.

What we experienced three weeks ago is a dream come true!