History Does Not Repeat; Juventus and Referee's lose to Benfica

I titled this article the way that I did because this was definitely one of the ugliest games I have ever seen thanks to some very bad refereeing that took place at the Stadio Città del Tricolore in Turin as Benfica visited Juventus in the second leg of their Europa League match. Five yellow cards and three red cards were handed out in a game that English referee Mark Clattenburg let get out of hand. FIFA should review this game because Clattenburg was very inconsistent in all of his calls, but if Juventus is to blame anyone of their exit after the game finished tied at zero it's themselves. At one point, they had five straight offsides calls that could've resulted in five goals, but due to the outstanding defensive play by Benfica catching them with the offsides trap, Benfica is the one moving forward. They talked about the last time these two teams met in such a competitive game with Benfica winning the first leg 2 to 1 in 1993 followed by a loss in Turin, but not today.

As I had said above, it was a very ugly game, but Benfica is one step closer to breaking the curse of Béla Guttmann since 1962 was the last time Benfica won a European championship. Juventus may have controlled 63% of the possession throughout the game, but Benfica's stingy defense were the real story of this game and particularly Luisão who had the match saving moment of the game when he headed away what would've been the game changer. Enzo Pérez was the first Benfica player to get the exit when he received two yellow cards within six minutes of each other and it left Benfica down to ten men for most of the match. Then in the 89TH minute, Mirko Vučinić and Lazar Marković would receive red cards for a bench clearing confrontation. Then one of the most unfortunate things would happen to Benfica as one of their players would catch a Paul Pogba boot to the face that left him bleeding and in the locker rooms. That left Benfica down to nine men, but they weren't worried as they held Juventus through eight minutes of stoppage time with no goals. Benfica will go on to the finals which will be held in Turin as they face the Spanish side of Sevilla.