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Wednesday, 13 June 2012 23:20 |
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In a group that was always going to go down to the wire...but boy did they make us suffer as always! Portugal is so clearly better than Denmark, made the perfect start in going up 2-0 and then make hard work at beating them in the end. Great resilience and focus to still manage to get the winner after the set-back of being pegged back to 2-2. But it shouldn't have even got to that really, we all agree on that I'm sure.
I won't even blame the 2 misses by Ronaldo (poor as they were, he just doesn't do it for the Seleccao like he does it at club level does he?). More important, i felt, was the slack and lethargic performance for most of the second half. For 30 minutes of the second half we were playing like a team that was leading 2 or 3 zero and had the match in the bag. We should've been looking to kill off the match a lot more than we did. 2-1 was always dangerous and when Denmark capitalised on this slackness and equalised, i feared the worst. Our midfield in that second half was average at best and is the worse midfield we've had in over 20 years now. Denmark had more possesion, that says it all really. We really lack a true number 10!!
Sounds like I'm being harsh, but there were positives of course! Again the resilience to go and score again after they equalised was impressive and that fighting spirit may yet take us far in this tournament. We only started playing in that second half once the Danes equalised (shades of the first match with Germany)...and this is something Bento has to work on, we have to PLAY for the whole 90 minutes.
Varela was great and has done more in his 2 cameo appearances than any of the other forwards. I've always said I'd like to see us try him out at centre-forward as he's got a certain directness that the others lack. A rotating front-3 of him, CR7 and Nani would have frightening pace for any defence to cope with. It will be interesting to see what Bento goes for up front against the Dutch!
As for the final decider, as a fellow poster has demonstrated with all the statistics...it's all on a knife edge and anything could happen really. What we have to do is go for the win against the Dutch, we can't be hoping a draw will be good enough (a Danish win would knock us out if we drew)...so we gotta go for goals against that weak Dutch defence. 3 points will guarantee qualification, so there's no point having any other objective for the match. Also I don't think the Germans will rest players against the Danes...they are not mathematically through yet and the Germans will always want to win the group, so i expect them to go all out for the win in their final match and this would clearly be to our benefit. All to play for!! I am confident we can qualify, but there are some clear flaws that Bento and the squad have to address first....we can do it for sure...FORCA SEMPRE!!!
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