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":395929,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[49,50,51,47,52,48],"class_list":{"0":"post-395928","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-headlines","8":"tag-headlines","9":"tag-news","10":"tag-top-news","11":"tag-top-stories","12":"tag-topnews","13":"tag-topstories"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/395928","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=395928"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/395928\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/395929"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=395928"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=395928"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=395928"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}