Three matches and three home victories for Sporting who did not experience as peaceful an evening as the score suggests. Whistles and whistling muscles tarnished the joy of Anderlecht, in the lead at mid-playoffs.
If it is true that the first twenty minutes of the match were abominable, the negative reaction of some of the supporters served as a reminder that Parc Astrid remains a double-edged sword. A twelfth man, often motivating, sometimes oppressive.
19 seconds of play between the two goals
The Circle team looks like a school of piranhas attacking a poor wildebeest crossing a river. To get out of this dry cleaning alive, you need technique above the rest. And it's no coincidence that Dolberg was the best Mauve when things were tough. Often the only one who knows how to keep the ball for more than two seconds.
He also had a nice reflex by jumping to avoid turning Leoni's first goal into an offside. Then he was there to take advantage of a pass that was too short from Lopes and cross towards Dreyer. There were only nineteen seconds of effective play between the two goals. Nineteen seconds to transform piranhas into friendly April Fools.
Dolberg even offered himself the best seat in the stadium, in the net, to enjoy Leoni's double before the hour mark, when Warleson played soap to dampen the hopes of the most optimistic green and black fan .
The lovely tale of Coosemans
In the last fifteen Anderlecht-Cercle, the RSCA has won fourteen times. And it's already been 375 minutes that Bruges have played against Sporting without scoring a single goal. Enough to calmly consider the “return” on Sunday to the Jan Breydelstadion? A Danish thigh and adductor caused a chill by forcing Dreyer then Schmeichel to come out before the second half. After Hazard and while waiting for Verschaeren, that's a lot. Nothing too serious at first glance for the purple top scorer and the goalkeeper but the alert is taken seriously by the staff.
A great story to tell to finish, even if Hans Christian Andersen would not have made a book of it: at 31 years old and at the end of his fourth season at Sporting, Coosemans played his first minutes with the A team on Wednesday. Excluding U23, the second goalkeeper has been waiting to play for 1266 days (in November 2020 with Ghent in the Europa League). And Colin felt like a fish in water as he calmly assured us.
