The wing-back has taken a circuitous route to the top but excelled in his side’s crucial Euro 2020 win over Portugal When Robin Gosens was a young man he wanted to be a police officer, just like his grandfather. However, he was told by one regional office that his legs were too different in height to make it so he ended up pursuing plan B instead: a career as a professional footballer.The German police force’s loss has been the Nationalmannschaft’s gain. On Saturday night Gosens was instrumental as Germany rediscovered their form and beat Portugal 4-2 to make an interesting Group F even more interesting. Related: Spain v Poland: Euro 2020 – live! Continue reading...
Two late goals in Portugal’s win leaves their star on 106, three short of the record, and he will fight to keep the trophy, tooHe celebrated like it was his first goal for Portugal rather than his 105th. That undampened desire is what keeps Cristiano Ronaldo going and makes him continually relevant. His emphatically finished penalty polished off doubt where there had been plenty. His smoothly finished second, leaving him just three short of Ali Daei’s international goal record, re‑emphasised his ruthlessness. Hungary didn’t deserve this, but Ronaldo happens.It marked another to his litany of records, playing and scoring in a fifth European Championship, and it will mean something to him – but it’s not the record he is really...
France are favourites, but I like the look of Portugal. And the question for England is can they handle the pressure?In an ideal world you would start a tournament perfectly and go through it winning everything. That’s what every team at the Euros wants to do. It is the pressure and expectation around that desire for perfection that derails so many teams and campaigns, because a loss early on becomes a big deal. But you can lose and progress. I was part of the Denmark team that showed that at the Euros in 2017: we lost to the Netherlands (who finished as champions) in our group but still got out of the group and reached the final.How you cope with...
Portugal’s victory at Euro 2016 and formidable current team are thanks to long-term investment in coaches and youthIt is one of the iconic images of European Championship history. With Portugal closing out the final in Saint-Denis, Cristiano Ronaldo buzzes down the touchline, gesticulating wildly to his teammates with neither a limp nor the troublesome left leg that he continually clutches fettering his energy.Both in the breathless tension of the Stade de France that night and re-watching now, it feels as if Ronaldo is the coach. It was not the contribution to the Euro 2016 final that their captain and most talismanic player had imagined but despite his truncated involvement on the field, after Dimitri Payet ploughed through him early in...
With individualists such as Özil and Pogba sadly marginalised, Atlético’s £110m man shows the classic No 10 still has a placeIn 19th-century Russian literature there was a recurrent figure known as The Superfluous Man. The Superfluous Man was talented, aimless, wealthy and pretty much redundant in society. He wrote poetry and wore finely stitched britches. He lounged on silken pouffes and was pointlessly good at pointless things. The world coddled and cosseted him. But it didn’t need him any more.It isn’t hard to find a few of these, our own Superfluous Men, in modern day football. This has been a constant note in the last year, the trend for a certain type of player, individualists with non-standard skills, to find...