UEFA under 21: do or die against England.

The lack of Orlando Sá is a little depressing. He’s the only one who can finish with some consistancy in the team. Anyway, England is weaker than Greece, I think, and we did beat the Greeks without him. If we fixed our finishing obstacle, we would have beaten the English at their home. The boys mustn’t fail with England this time.
Portugal 2-0 England
Portugal 3-1 Macedonia

Posted from  Portugal

Where is Diogo Salomao? He is supposed one of the top talent players in Portugal young NT?

I’ve heard great things but have yet to see a single minute of him in the championship. Sporting has been under considerable pressure due to the loss against Brondby (UEFA 1st leg) and the first game of the season against Paços de Ferreira. They seem do have recovered (3rd in the league and went through in the UEFA cup) and Paulo Sergio (Sporting Coach) has stated he will soon give him some play time.

Posted from  Portugal

I’m oficially done with this U21 team. I was deluded by some wins that they had, gave every opportunity they had and was even getting angry by those that criticized the team, but in the end they lacked aggressiveness and organization. They failed the major test with England. It has been said that they win as a team, so nobody’s absence should justify such innefective performance.
I don’t care about the tricks, dribbles and sole will to win. I want to see them creating clear chances AND score. IMO, every performance that doesn’t lead to goals is a poor performance. No matter how many opponents you dribble, nobody will remember it if the opportunity doesn’t end with the ball in the net.
England was effective and defended our attacks just as easily as in Wembley, sad but truth.

I wonder whether and if so, when this will translate to the bad results in the senior NT. We are still picking the fruits of the Golden Generation, since we always end up in easy groups and those that qualify with us to the tournament don’t do much better. The question is, how much will this last?
Or maybe I’m being pessimistic, since this year we were able to qualify to two U-xx tournaments, while in 2008-2009 we didn’t qualify at all.

Whatever, the U21s are a failure. Just the same as the previous ones, or maybe worse. The U17s and U19s should be considered a step-up, I think.

Posted from  Portugal

What?! A bunch of Portuguese players playing individualistically instead as a single team*? What a surprise!

Anyway well said Ivan.

*A recent FIFA technical report on the 2010 World Cup stated that teams that play as, erm well… a team are more successful then teams that don’t. It’s basically stating the obvious but I honestly think a lot of Portuguese players whether it’s the youth or the adults don’t seem to get this. There is something seriously wrong with our youth system when it comes to team play (and strikers)

Posted from  Netherlands

This seems always to be the problem as our young players grow. Look, both the U17s and U19s have always had at least some “promising” results and earned 5 and 3 European titles respectively.
You can already see the picture of them getting worse in the U19s. What about the achievements of the U21s? None! One final in 1994, lost 1-0 to Italy.

What I think is that the players in our country are sort of pressed at the beginning by their parents, telling them to do well so that they get attention from bigger clubs. They do, and therefore are quite good at that time.
But as time passes by, they relax and think the results will appear magically on a silver plate. They get tired and tend to perform worse and worse. That’s the thing: our players are also weak physically and rely on tricks that many times they didn’t come to perfect completely. The managers don’t seem to care much about the physical form of our players, so they underperform, often in crucial matches. And the parents do everything they can to pressure the managers to put their sons in the team no matter what. That’s while telling them to “enjoy the life”, which reads as “get out and entertain yourself as much as you want”, which is definitely wrong.
No wonder that once they reach the 19-20 years they dissapoint the country like that.

BTW, wut? Losing at home to Cyprus? Is the hell close
already?

Posted from  Portugal

No comment.

Posted from  Netherlands

OMG! Dis team iz amasing! Dey mad me lose oll hops in qualifing in teh farst dey!

Now seriously!
Is this the team that can play in auto mode and still win the games? Lololololol.

Posted from  Portugal

ok….so now we have finally learned how to score, but at the expense of forgetting how to defend!!!
4 goals from cyprus????!!!! the same cyprus that has a population of maybe 7 or so people!!!
i’m not at all upset…. unfortunately i’m used to bad results.

You just knew as soon as Almeida missed with that silly attempt at a back heel goal that Cyprus would get the last minute draw (at least it’s not a last minute win)
And why didn’t we play in a 4-2-3-1 formation, that’s the formation all WC semi-finalists used.

And if we can’t beat Cyprus at home how the hell are we supposed to beat the Scandinavian teams?

Is there a way to get rid of the FPF? I know FIFA doesn’t allow governmental interference but surely they can make an exception. Or maybe we should get the CIA to fabricate some rape charges against the FPF board, it seems to work against the Wikileak founder! ;p

Posted from  Netherlands

I can now see it. We will get dominated in Norway but somehow we draw there. We’ll lose in Porto in the 93rd minute with Denmark. We score at 9th minute in Iceland and win.
We’ll dominate Norway at home, but still a draw. In Cyprus, we score in the 28th minute, but concede in the 29th. Then we win the game in the 93rd minute. We’ll beat Iceland at home 3-0. Then we draw in Denmark 1-1, conceding a goal just before the break, and equalizing in the 86th minute. We qualify to the play-offs.

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Ptitle2s6v9yii

Or maybe worse

The defense is in even poorer shape than I thought, after all. It needs to be fixed immediately. By Agostinho Oliveira? Ha!

Posted from  Portugal

Heyy, I think we all underestimated Cyprus….here’s some shock victories/draws done by the minnows.

Cyprus 1-1 Italy (1983- when Italy were world champions).

Cyprus 3-2 Spain (1998)

So, really there is no reason for a total freak-out. Maybe if we don’t win the next two or three games, then we can all ignore the NT, and go back to complaining about Benfica getting penalties left and right, Porto cheating their way to a victory, Sporting being incredibly average and Braga being the only team the be proud of in Portugal.

Well, I wasn’t underestimating Cyprus, since I predicted a 2-0 win only and knew about their previous upsets. I wasn’t expecting THIS to happen (yeah, I know about the 0-0 with Albania!). The same defense than conceded 1 off-side goal against Spain in 4 World Cup games gets 4 at home against Cyprus!???
It really makes you scratch your head…

Posted from  Portugal

Coentrão out against Norway. It’s looking better already! [/sarcasm]

Posted from  Netherlands

to score 4 goals on your own home soil, and still not win the match ….. that should make me freak out :/
but as i said, i’m used to surprises from this NT

Posted from  France

Useless statistics:
This was the first time Portugal conceded more than 3 goals in a home qualifying match, and the biggest draw yet of the NT: In 1926 and 1935 Portugal had two 3-3 draws. Now, 4-4.

Posted from  Portugal

good to know that Ivan

Posted from  France

good thing that france lost or else we would’ve had the worst result this round of qualification :S

Posted from  France

The scary thing is Carvalho had to make TWO critical defensive tackles or it could have been another 2 goals to Cyprus.

I thought Eduardo was left stranded on the first 3 goals, so i don’t blame him, but he should have done better with the initial shot that led to their 4th goal.

Where we lost the game was in our absence of killer instinct. we were bossing the match in the second half (a couple off the woodwork) and then all of the sudden we thought we had the game won and got WAY too cute (Almeida) or to selfish (Quaresma…which is a shame because he showed flashes of pure talent, but he’s either too selfish to use he team mates or too stupid).

One thing we DO know is Agostinho Oliveira is not worthy as consideration of being the new coach of the national team. We had a slender one goal lead and he was in a hurry to use all his substitutes to get some players some playing time. Once Joao Moutinho was on the field we started to get over run in the midfield. It seemed all he could do was foul.

The reason why we lost is because we conceded goals, four of them in fact while we should have conceded none. Miggy pointed out that Cyprus can cause upsets, indeed they can, when they play at home. Last time I checked Guimarães is in Portugal not Cyprus. If we can’t beat Cyprus at home, I doubt we can beat Cyprus away (or any of the other teams in this group… well maybe Iceland but I shouldn’t get my hopes up!)

Looking at the Cypriot goals, the first and third one was caused by Miguel letting his man go (trying to offside him). I honestly can’t believe I’m saying this but I want P.Ferreira back he might not be as good as Miguel going forward but at least he knows how to defend.
The fourth goal was a mistake by Eduardo he should have pushed the ball over the net or towards the corner flag. Still I can’t believe how easily we conceded a goal after a little bit of pressure of Cyprus.

The second goal is a bit unlucky Meireles didn’t hit the ball correctly, although Eduardo could have certainly done better. And that’s just the goals, there were plenty of defensive mistakes especially by Alves, he had a really poor match.

I don’t want one more match with Oliveira*, let alone 6 month worth of matches (that Spain friendly is going to be a riot with Oliveira as coach), FPF board needs to go along with Quieroz. The longer this goes on the more embarrassing it gets.

*And people wonder why I don’t want a Portuguese coach, Mourinho must be a genetic fluke because he’s the only good coach we produced all the others are either average, poor or outright awful and certainly not worthy for the national team.

Posted from  Netherlands

i’m watching the re-run of the “disaster of a match” right now …. it hurts more than when it was live :’(
let’s hope we can make a more decent performance 2 days from now…..

Miguel & Alves had a terrible game. I’m not going to give a pass to Meireles on the 2nd goal because he tried to close control the ball with the attacking player on his back him, which is a moronic thing to do. He should have just booted the ball out of danger.

@Rui I honestly think Meireles didn’t hit the ball correctly.
But your interpretation could work as well. ;p

Posted from  Netherlands