hm…I agree for the most.I just don’t agree about fan and referee thing.
You whistled thru our anthem as well.
And the ref was awful.Maybe you didn’t see it but he gave early 2 yellow cars to 2 defenders(for no reasons) which he knew was crucual.Your every attack would be either red card or goal-so choose.
When you scored goal,he started insanity.Come on,every touch between Dzeko and Portugal player was a foul.Not to say Salihovic’s red card…Nani should have goten 10 by now if that was a red card.Bruno Alves wanted to kick a referee at the beggining of 2 half but Carvalho stopped him and Bruno was at his face,and that wasn’t a yellow card?
I’m not saying referee is guilty for loss,you were excellent team at this game,I just don’t see why do you need referee on your side when you don’t need him.
But I must say,4 out of 5 best players were missing last night and you still score only 1 goal,I wonder what would happen if FIFA haven’t changed the rule about yellow card immediatly after Piennar drew Bosnia and Portugal together…
IF you think that every one gets equal chance,you are wrong,big teams are in a huge advantage…if you don’t believe check out France’s goal against Ireland-THAT IS DISCRASE!!!

I agree with Sergio. The Netherlands should go into pot 1 and Portugal together with France into the second. It makes sense with their current ranking. Even if Portugal gets passed France in tomorrow’s updated ranking.

I DON’T want Portugal to draw any adversary our players might consider inferior. Please no South Africa, New Zealand, Japan, North or South Korea, Honduras, Algeria, Nigeria, Cameroon or Côte d’Ivoire.
I want them to face every match with that wanting-to-prove-I’m-better-attitude. No slacking.

@spaha
Since the 2006 WC I’ve felt most referee’s did more to harm Portugal then anything else. Somehow we got so much bad press on account of the supposed diving of our players (British media leading the pack) that some of it rubbed off on the referees affecting their judgement. I do admit yesterday’s match saw a referee that finally called every foul that had to be called. We finally weren’t penalized. But we weren’t favoured either. Simão got a yellow card for stepping (I believe accidentally) on one of your players and got a yellow card. One of yours did the same 3 minutes later to Pepe and got nothing. Shit happens.

Posted from  Portugal

Portugal receives every month fans from around the world by the thousands. Clubs such as Porto, Sporting and Benfica frequently host top UEFA games with packed stadiums. We know how to act as hosts. No problems are to be reported. Not one of our qualifiers had any incident reported.

14th of November 2009. Along comes Bosnia. Small holdup at the airport. Standard stuff. You get to the stadium and start throwing stuff onto the pitch after our goal. BiH FA had asked us to cage you like animals because they didn’t want another Belgium incident. We refused but allotted a large amount of police officers to control any bad behaviour. Standard stuff. Supporters try and break the line and force their way onto the pitch. Police react. 5000 fans vs 400 police officers. Police officers have families too, they can panic. The bats come out and I HUGLY REGRET a women got injured. We are all very sorry for this. Believe it. Portugal is a country known for its hospitality, peaceful and kind people. One idiot must have thrown a plastic bottle into the press area. It hit a Bosnian reporter. FFS! Don’t judge us because one idiot cop cracked open a women’s head and another anonymous idiot had the stupidest idea to throw that bottle!

I firmly believe Bosnian press started a smear campaign. We don’t attack girls just because they wear a Bosnian flag! That is ridiculous. We don’t spit on and insult people. This is news that only came out after it happened at your airport. If any of what you say happened here our press would have a field day exposing it all over the news. That is our press. They don’t kid around when it comes to exposing any type of wrong doings, be it from high profiled government officials or Joe Nobody.

Portugal was one of the first countries to come to Bosnia’s aid when the war broke out. We still have military in your country helping. We received with open arms many refugees. They were offered food and shelter and many still work in Portugal. That is our way of live. That is what Portugal does to define its nature. We are the safe harbour for so many people facing all sorts of turmoil in their home country.

The play-off is over. Let us just try and bury all this animosity and move on. Best of luck to Bosnia in the qualifying campaign for the Euro 2012.

Posted from  Portugal

I love the fact how throughout this past week I haven’t seen Portugal supporters actually STOP being pompous, talking trash and being full of themselves, pre-game, post-game or during the game. And yet the almighty Portugal almost choked up on Bosnia hahaha. I’m Bosnian, but I do admit that we had a much weaker team, and yet the shit froze over in Portuguese fans in game 1 when we hit the woodwork 3 times (twice in the last minute!). Priceless. And quit crying about and using Ronaldo’s absence as an excuse for everything…we were missing 4 great players from the first leg yesterday, too – on paper, you should have beaten us with your second team easily…both times! We did sort of prove one thing though – its not the size of the dog in the fight, its the size of the fight in the dog…BHF 4 life!

Posted from  United States

Yes your dog had very little fight in him indeed.
Are you mad? Nobody used Ronaldo’s absence as an excuse for anything! What is there to excuse? We won both games! You will even find many of us thinking it’s a good thing (not that I agree).
Did your TV freeze on you during the 1st leg because Portugal was on top most of the game and came out on top in the end. So what if we froze for 5 seconds while 3 balls hit the woodwork. At the end of that game who do you think tasted the sweet ale of victory and who went home crying?

Posted from  Portugal

Hey Miguel,

Do you have better things to do than answer to every post on this site? I guess this shows how opsessed you are…take it easy man, Portugal won, so why are you trying so hard to explain/justify everything???

The truth is portugal draws more fouls because portugal has more ball possession, and many of our players (ronaldo, deco, nani & simao) have no problem dribbling the ball into defenders (thus legitimately drawing a foul)

The only thing I don’t like to see is them staying down and rolling over in pain…. but on the other hand refs are supposed to protect players from systematic & continuous fouling, and I’ve never seen them fill that role when it comes to the portuguese team.

It angers me when so called “football fans” rather see a defender get away with a foul than an attacking player showcase the skill which they’ve worked so hard to forge.

Also, i have a problem with England being in a pot 1 ahead of portugal. i still don’t understand their higher ranking given the results over the last few major tournaments.

Holland has a slightly better case, but again looking at the results of the last few tourneys i feel portugal should (slightly) edge them out.

Anyway UEFA rankings have been released today, we’re 7th that means we’ll definitely be top seeded for the Euro 2012 qualification groups.

And the FIFA ranking has been released as well and I’m shocked…

Portugal are 5th higher than Germany, France, Argentina and England.

@Miguel Cameroon, Nigeria and Côte d’Ivoire are considered the three best African teams and certainly are no push overs. Cameroon is currently 10th, Côte d’Ivoire is 16th but they played a 2-2 friendly against Germany. We’ve lost every match against Germany since 2000.

CONGRATS PORTUGAL !!

Actually in this game I’m personally assess if Portugal can win against the Bosnian only 1 goal only because Portugal is not complete without Cristiano Ronaldo .. just one word from me is for Portugal congratulations!

http://soccerpropick.com

Posted from  Australia

Hey Lara… there are 2 Miguel writing here… I am the one that wrote the post “November 19th, 2009 at 12:22 pm”
We take it easy (me and my fellow portuguese collegue). We are being easy… but please, everyone has the right to reply as many times as she/he wants.
Fortenately we don’t have to justify much regarding what happened in this sad episode between BiH and PT…
have fun

Posted from  Portugal

Wow Mr. Miguel
In what world are YOU living in?
Of course they didnt read that because the world wouldnt write something that will put Portugal in a false light. You cant say it didnt happen just because you didnt see it happen, my bosnian friends were there and they told me what was going on.
BIH didnt fight against Portugal. BIH fought aganist the whole world that night, its so obvious whats going on here.
Theres no justice, look what happned to Ireland.

Posted from  Denmark

congratulations! see you in south africa.

In these two games with Bosnia, I noticed that Portugal players got very tired and very weak after 80 min. They gathered in the penalty area and defend themselves. Bosnia was unlucky in the first game when they could score at least 3 goals. Bosnia is physically weak team. But in World Cup this will hurt Portugal against physically strong teams. I think in euro qualifications Portugal will struggle because they should replace veterans with younger players. This same happened to France after leaving Zidan, Thuram, Makélélé, and Viera. France did struglle in this transaction of players.

We want to congratulate Portugal to be in South africa next year.
We ar the best time in the world.

Thanks for this

Posted from  Portugal

@ leo

I don’t see any way that Bosnia could have scored 3 goals in the first leg. If you give them the Crossbar(s) & Post as goals that’d be 2. I think there was another half chance, but eduardo made the save.

On the other hand Portugal missed many of their chances. I think 1-0 was a fair result, but perhaps 2-1 for portugal would’ve been more indicative of the play & chances by both teams.

Strange that UEFA has Portugal 7th in europe but FIFA has them 4th in the world.

UEFA uses a different ranking system from FIFA, UEFAs ranking is more fair since it includes more factors.

Posted from  Canada

@ Leo

That’s because Queiroz used (essentially) the EXACT same squad in pretty much the last 5 Portugal games. So players would be tired after 80 minutes.

Posted from  United Kingdom

I just reviewed the final 15 min. of the game because I have no idea where Leo got the idea we gathered in the penalty area and defended.
After 80min Deco came on and we had 3 goal scoring opportunities.
Hasagic defended shots from Edinho and Bruno Alves and Edinho had that incredible miss over the cross-bar. Just one shot from Dzeko.

Posted from  Portugal

@ Dom

I don’t think the UEFA rankings are more fair than FIFA at all. I wouldn’t put Croatia or England above Portugal based on results from the last 4 years.

On the other hand i wouldn’t put Portugal as high as #5. I think both systems are flawed. I suppose that’s what happens when you try to rank teams from all over`the world and they don’t share anywhere near the same opponents.

UEFA boosts about how the new system ensures “sporting balance and fairness” stating: “The new system reflects better the real strength of each national team, as it now also takes into account matches played in UEFA EURO and World Cup final tournaments, and not only games in the qualifying competitions.”

Posted from  Portugal

We’re still better than Italy.

“the world wouldnt write something that will put Portugal in a false light”
“BIH fought aganist the whole world that night”

Wow. I didn’t know we were that important. The thing is… we aren’t. Journalists live for those moments where they can expose the dirt of big names. They don’t give a flying fck about nationality. But no. Wait! We are talking about BiH. Ok then I’m sure all of them, not just one or two, ALL OF THEM, were very eager to pocket their pens so as not to “put Portugal in a false light”. Wow. Sorry I didn’t catch in what world YOU are living in. Come again?

I do remember feeling something similar in 1997 when we played our last game of the WC1998 qualifiers against Germany in Germany. We needed to win, if we did Germany might not make France. We were winning. Rui Costa got called in for replacement and was walking to the side-line. The ref didn’t like the way he put one foot in front of the other so just as he was about to step of the pitch a red card was handed out. One man down. Germany ended up leveling and we finished one point short of making at least the play-offs. Shit really does happen.

Posted from  Portugal

Currently? Think so. I’d like to see that match up on the pitch. Just to make sure everyone else knows.

Posted from  Portugal

Look where France and Croatia are on that list, 7th and 10th place?
That’s crazy.
Somehow i doubt that portugal will be a seeded team, although wih their 4th place finish in 06, you would think maybe they should be.
On the other point, people could say portugal is better than italy, but I think the result on the pitch would show otherwise