Bulgaria beat Portugal 2-1 in the European U21 qualifiers in Group B on the way to next year's championship, which turned out to be not only their first loss and first goals conceded. This is also the first defeat for their coach Luis Freire in charge at all and for this reason he was very angry after the end of the match.
Three minutes before the final whistle, Freire's men were leading 1-0, and after the end he said that his team did not deserve this cruel result.
„The analysis is simple. We had a very good first half, we completely dominated. We had 6 or 7 goal chances. And also shots that hit the post, the goalkeeper saved some of them. So, a very good attacking move, against a team that had already proven with the Czech Republic that it is not easy to play against them at home“, began the Portuguese coach.
„But the truth is that we managed to have all this superiority and did not score. We missed a lot of chances in the first half, I think it is fair to say that we deserved to win at half-time“, regretted Freire.
„In the second half we came back with the same energy, with the same desire to score, we continued to create chances and did not allow Bulgaria much. In the end, we made the score 1:0, which was fair, and then we had 2, 3, 4 chances. From 1:0 onwards, Bulgaria also took more risks, the game became more open, more physical. The Bulgarians started to look for more counterattacks. But we could have scored several times, through Afonso Moreira, Rodrigo Mora, Rafael Nel. By not finishing the score 2-0, we didn't kill the game. If the ball had gone in, we could have scored 3, 4, 5 goals“, he said, explaining what went wrong in the last minutes.
“We didn't score, we didn't score and in the end we conceded a goal where we usually don't concede. From a corner they made it 1-1 and, of course, they had nothing to lose, they took a risk. And we tried to win, but we became too unbalanced. This should serve as a lesson for us, especially after we led 1-0, we need to be more efficient in scoring the second goal, giving the ball to the one who is better positioned“, explained the angry coach of the team from the Iberian Peninsula.
But Portugal – who today missed out on securing an early berth in the European finals, can do so in the next round as hosts of the last in the group Gibraltar on the 30th of this month.