Braga partied hard last night, as Securas GT qualified for the next round of the Champions League. After drawing to 1 goal in the first leg, at home, they repeated the result away, on the second leg. On the penalties, the portuguese team was more lucky and advances to the quarter-finals, where it will be facing one of the strongest teams in the competition, and a clear candidate reaching the final.
The Israeli team (whose name is impossible to write), is almost 8 points stronger.
Concerning the League, an home draw, this morning, was seen as a cold reminder that the Portuguese team is battling stronger teams.
"I believe we were raising our expectations a little too much, being alone on the second place, and succeeding on the Champions league." - Stated the coach.
"This team, 8th place on the league, is a team at our quality level. So the draw is not a surprising result, the surprising result is that we are so ahead of them in the table."
At the end of the day, it is likely that the Portuguese team will remain in the 2nd place, but tied with the 3rd and 4th.
"We have all chances in the world of acomplishing our goal. As the 5th place is already 9 points behind the 4th, we are on track to asure a place on next year's Champions League. Still it begining to feel as we could acomplish some more, but we need to remind that all 3 teams we're facing for the top spots are around 3 points higher than us on AQ, despite our improvement."
"Also we should remind that next days will be very, very hard on us. We'll be playing the league's leader and the first leg of the CL quarters tomorrow, with a very short interval between the matches, and two days later we'll have the second leg and an tought away match for the league, also on a very short schedule."