A team that has been embraced as siblings by the hosts Qatar has delivered a truly great moment in World Cup historyMorocco were almost there. The whistles had intensified, if that was humanly possible, and Walid Regragui needed to convey one last point. They would play with 10 men for the final few minutes and the manager called Azzedine Ounahi, the lungs and fizzing brain of his midfield, to the touchline.A word in the ear, perhaps audible but quite possibly not, concluded with a shake of the shoulders, a slap on the back, a physical way of demanding an extra iota of focus before Portugal pass, pass, passed their way through the thirds once more. Continue reading...
The 21-year-old Benfica forward scored a hat-trick on his first World Cup start, fizzing one goal in from an impossible angleThere was a notable absentee on Tuesday night from the World Cup last-16 game between Portugal and Switzerland. Specifically, the Swiss. Granted, Switzerland would make their belated entrance in the second half, a cameo appearance to console the thousands of fans who had come to support them.But the result was no longer in doubt, and ultimately their presence was largely inconsequential. A reminder, if any were needed, that elite football has no place for those who are not prepared to put in a defensive shift. Continue reading...
Portugal striker put off-field dramas behind him to become the first man to score at five World Cups in thriller against GhanaOh no, not another Cristiano Ronaldo column. Well, what else could it be? Who else could it be? How about the player whose goal made it 1-1 and made a wild match of a night that, until then, really hadn’t been? João Félix, who clipped in a lovely shot to put Portugal back into the lead? Rafael Leão, perhaps, guiding his first touch into the net. There was Osman Bukari, scoring with two minutes to go – well, 10 – and at the end, Iñaki Williams, a flash of cunning that caught out everyone. That almost saw Ghana catch...
He may have lost a battle of fine margins with Romelu Lukaku in Seville, but at 36 Ronaldo has shown in this tournament he is still an asset to Portugal and beyondThree minutes before half-time, Romelu Lukaku turned in the centre-circle and made another arcing run. He had been making them all half, and would go on making them, but had touched the ball only nine times, less than half as many as any other outfielder. This time, though, the ball arrived, via Thorgan Hazard’s clip over the top, and he was able to hold off Rúben Dias and gather. For pretty much the first time in the game, Belgium had the ball in a dangerous area and Portugal were...
For all their excellence, the legacy of the ageing world No 1 team boils down to the next two weeks, starting against PortugalThere is a moment towards the end of the recent BBC documentary Whistle to Whistle in which, after an hour of fixating on the details and minutiae of his job as Belgium coach, Roberto Martínez finally allows himself to take a broader view. “I just feel that this generation deserves silverware,” he says. “They deserve something that will be talked about for the next 50, 60, 70 years. But that doesn’t mean it’s going to happen.”In those few sentences, Martínez expresses the fundamental paradox of his job, in many ways the fundamental paradox of international football. Since taking...