Ruben Amorim has one hand on his second Liga Portugal title after a stunning 2-1 Lisbon derby win over Benfica.
Sporting, who hadn’t won the title since 2002 before Amorim’s arrival, are now top of the division by four points with a game in hand and seven matches to play.
A revolutionary coach who has transformed the team, Amorim is being linked with a summer move to Liverpool and Barcelona, and his latest display showed exactly why.
Catamo opened the scoring in the first minute and then bagged the winner in the final seconds, bursting into tears following some incredible scenes.
Arriving in Portugal from Mozambique aged just 17, a year later Catamo left Amora for Sporting, but barely made an impression.
Loans to Vitoria Guimaraes and Maritimo followed, but with just a handful of appearances, it looked like the youngster’s dreams of making it in Europe would be short-lived.
Despite that, every summer he returned to Lisbon, worked hard, gave everything in pre-season, and Amorim took a shine to him.
Assistant coach Filipe Celikkaya recalled: “One day I was with Rúben and Geny in the office and he conveyed in a very simple and special way that he would have a locker the following year in the main team. Hearing this, for an 18-year-old, you have to feel special.”
Catamo kept working, but it took six years before he finally improved his game enough for his first team chance, and Amorim rewarded him.
This season he’s broken through and the Lisbon derby was his 18th start out of 35 appearances, and clearly his best yet.
His story is almost unprecedented, though, with one of the grandest clubs happy to keep waiting for his potential to shine through despite getting like money in return for the salary they were paying him for the previous five years.
Now, though, he’s paid all that faith back in a single game. Without Amorim’s understanding of youngsters which he’s proved time and time again, the most unique of stories in European football would have never come to fruition.
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