Portugal in danger of falling at the first hurdle

As a con­ti­nent with such a wealth of excel­lent foot­balling nations there will, inevitably, be a few so-called ‘big boys’ from Europe who don’t make the final tour­na­ment in South Africa in 2010.  One nation that is in very real dan­ger of being such a casu­alty is Por­tu­gal.  They may not be the most dec­o­rated or respected side in Europe but they made it through to the semi-final stage of the last tour­na­ment in 2006 and have some tal­ented play­ers amongst their ranks, not least Man­ches­ter United’s Cris­tiano Ronaldo.

Por­tu­gal cur­rently lie third in the FIFA World Cup Euro­pean Qual­i­fy­ing : Group One Table and trail lead­ers Den­mark and Hun­gary by seven points with just five games to play.  In the Euro­pean qual­i­fy­ing tables, the top team from each of the nine groups auto­mat­i­cally qual­i­fies, with the eight high­est runners-up going into four play-off matches, the win­ner of each play-off will earn a place in South Africa.

Por­tu­gal cur­rently have just six points from five games and have won only once, draw­ing three and los­ing one.  Even if they do fin­ish sec­ond in the group there is also a rea­son­able chance they could have acquired the low­est num­ber of points and would there­fore miss the play-offs, but this is a bit too hypo­thet­i­cal to get into at the moment so I’ll just stick to what is going on right now.

Basi­cally Car­los Queiroz, the head coach of Por­tu­gal, has got a tough job on his hands and he will need close to max­i­mum points from his next five fix­tures.  The five games which will deter­mine whether we see Cris­tiano Ronaldo and co line up in South Africa are as fol­lows — Alba­nia, Den­mark and Hun­gary away fol­lowed by two final home games against Hun­gary and Malta.

The games against Alba­nia and Malta look like easy wins and I doubt many would con­sider back­ing the Alba­ni­ans or the Mal­tese to get any­thing out of Por­tu­gal with their inter­na­tional foot­ball bet­ting.  How­ever, their prob­lem has been draw­ing too many games and if they slip up against either of these two sides the task in front of them will be very dif­fi­cult, indeed the Malta game could prove fatal as it is their last qulai­fier!  The game against Den­mark and the two against Hun­gary are the very def­i­n­i­tion of ‘must wins’ for Queiroz as he has a fairly daunt­ing seven point gap to close and only five games to do it in.

With five games to go it isn’t all over for the Por­tuguese but they’re going to have to win at least four of their last five to make the final tour­na­ment in South Africa.  Inevitably there will be some heavy­weight casu­al­ties from Europe, with the Czech Repub­lic and Turkey also look­ing in dan­ger of miss­ing the main event.  At the moment it looks a very real pos­si­bil­ity that South Africa 2010 will be miss­ing the skills of the likes of Ricardo Quaresm, Jose Bosingwa, Simao Sabrosa, Miguel Veloso and of course Cris­tiano Ronaldo.