Sarri Refuses To Worry About Lazio's Defeat To Porto In The Europa League

Maurizio Sarri (Twitter.com/@oficialSSLazio)

JAKARTA - The first leg of the Europa League play-off on Friday, February 18 this morning featured a match between Porto and Lazio. Appearing as a guest team at the Dragao Stadium, Lazio must recognize the strength of the host.

In that match, Porto successfully showed their spurs with a 2-1 victory. However, Lazio coach Maurizio Sarri did not care about this result.

Sarri implied that the victory deserved to be secured by Porto, because Sergio Conceicao's team had toppled teams as big as AC Milan and Juventus in the previous year.

"The 1-2 result is not too bad, moreover Porto showed strength by getting rid of Juventus and AC Milan in recent years," Sarri said after the match quoted from the uefa.com page.

In that match, Lazio actually stole the lead first through a goal made by Mattia Zaccagni when the game had only been running for 23 minutes. But the visitors' efforts to bring home the victory were actually blocked by the hosts.

Porto returned Lazio's advantage just before half-time. Unmitigated, the hosts immediately made a drastic change through a brace made by Toni Martinez in the 37th minute.

The second goal was again made by Martinez after halftime or to be precise in the 49th minute. Porto's success turned the situation around 2-1 Lazio failed to catch up and lasted until the game was over.

After his team's failure in the first leg, Sarri chose to shift his focus to other things instead of mourning it. The Italian coach wants his team to focus on the next match.

"Now we focus on the next game where we have to face Udinese (in the Italian League)," said the coach.

Despite getting unsatisfactory results, Lazio still has the opportunity to reply to Porto at home, the Stadio Olimpico in the second leg which will be held next week.