Sporting Lisbon Thrash Bodo/Glimt To Reach Champions League Quarters

Sporting Lisbon made an impressive comeback to hammer Norwegian giantkillers Bodo/Glimt 5-0 on Tuesday and reach the Champions League quarter-finals 5-3 on aggregate.

After a 3-0 last 16 first leg defeat last week north of the Arctic Circle, Sporting produced a ruthless display in Portugal to book a spot in the last eight for the first time since the 1982/83 season.

Pedro Goncalves and Luis Suarez netted to force extra-time, and Maximiliano Araujo scored in the 92nd minute to put Sporting ahead for the first time in the tie, before Rafael Nel smashed home a fifth late on.

“We had the right intensity and energy, we did what we didn’t do there,” forward Francisco Trincao told Sport TV.

“We had a different energy, a different kind of joy, and we played a historic game.

Bodo/Glimt shocked last season’s runners-up Inter Milan in the play-off round and defeated Manchester City and Atletico Madrid in the league phase before that.

Perhaps it daunted them, as they seemed to be playing with fear from the start in Lisbon.

“We’ve had a fantastic journey, then we enter a game where it seems to me that we’re not playing the game, we’re playing the opportunity — and that opportunity is going to be too big for us,” Knutsen told TV2.

“We were thinking about the consequences from the first kick… we were so far from our identity.”

Around 2,000 Bodo/Glimt fans made the long trek to Jose Alvalade stadium, where their dream was mercilessly crushed under the rain.

Ruthless Rout

Knutsen selected the same line-up for the sixth Champions League match running, a competition record. Rui Borges’s Sporting peppered the Bodo/Glimt goal, with Nikita Haikin saving from Colombian striker Suarez early on.

Kasper Hogh, who scored in the first leg, had a fine chance to send the visitors ahead against the run of play at the other end but dragged his shot a long way wide.

Bodo/Glimt almost pulled back level but Odin Bjortuft headed against the crossbar, with the ball flying upwards and then dropping downwards onto the woodwork again, before Sporting were able to recover.

The Portuguese side forged their second goal just after the hour mark with Suarez racing in down the right and pulling the ball across for Goncalves to tap home.

Bodo/Glimt held on to force extra-time but after just two minutes of it Araujo fired home, drilling inside Haikin at the near post for Sporting’s fourth.

Sporting wisely kept control through the rest of the additional period and wrapped things up at the death when Nel rifled into the top corner.