Mourinho’s men were much the better team for long spells and had missed a number of opportunities and seen a penalty overturned by the video assistant referee before falling behind to a Kylian Mbappe header.<\/p>\n
But the hosts were level six minutes later as Vangelis Pavlidis made the most of a slip from Raul Asencio to cross for Andreas Schjelderup, who headed home.<\/p>\n
Benfica were cutting through Madrid at will and went in front on the stroke of half-time, Pavlidis scoring from the spot after Nicolas Otamendi went down under a challenge from Aurelien Tchouameni.<\/p>\n
It got better for the Portuguese side after the break as Schjelderup was given far too much time and space inside the visitors’ penalty area and fired a shot past Courtois at his near post.<\/p>\n
Mbappe pulled one back for Alvaro Arbeloa’s side moments later with a smart finish for his 13th Champions League goal of the campaign to set up a dramatic finale.<\/p>\n
There were chances at both ends before Asencio was sent off for a second bookable offence in the 92nd minute. Substitute Rodrygo then earned himself two yellow cards for dissent in the space of a few seconds as Madrid were reduced to nine.<\/p>\n
But the drama was not finished with Benfica going on to score the crucial goal in the most remarkable of circumstances.<\/p>\n
With Madrid finishing ninth and Benfica in 24th, there is now a 50-50 chance that they will meet again in the play-off round.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Mourinho’s men were much the better team for long spells and had missed a number of opportunities and…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":308869,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[9,10,18,13,14,6,19,17,11,12,15,16,5,7,8],"class_list":{"0":"post-308868","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-headlines","8":"tag-breaking-news","9":"tag-breakingnews","10":"tag-eire","11":"tag-featured-news","12":"tag-featurednews","13":"tag-headlines","14":"tag-ie","15":"tag-ireland","16":"tag-latest-news","17":"tag-latestnews","18":"tag-main-news","19":"tag-mainnews","20":"tag-news","21":"tag-top-stories","22":"tag-topstories"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ie\/115975434356035145","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/308868","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=308868"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/308868\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/308869"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=308868"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=308868"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=308868"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}