Portugal vs Bosnia World Cup Playoff Preview

On Sat­ur­day 14th Novem­ber 2009, Por­tu­gal play Bosnia-Herzegovina in the first leg of their World Cup play­off. This is a really tough one to pre­dict for me, as Por­tu­gal have really strug­gled in the group stage and Bosnia appear to have a strong side. Sports retail­ers will cer­tainly be hop­ing for a Por­tuguese vic­tory, as they are likely to be one of the best sell­ing World Cup Jer­seys likely to be among the best sell­ing kits next sum­mer. Before we look at the two teams in more depth, let’s take a look at their qual­i­fy­ing per­for­mance in the group stage.

The first thing that comes to mind when com­par­ing the group tables is that many peo­ple will feel that Bosnia per­formed very well and Por­tu­gal under­achieved. I would cer­tainly have pre­dicted Por­tu­gal to fin­ish top of Group 1, but they were only a loss away from fin­ish­ing 4th!. I would antic­i­pate that Car­los Queiroz will lose his posi­tion if those play­ing in a Por­tu­gal World Cup jer­sey do not qual­ify for the World Cup. In Group 5, Bosnia-Herzegovina fin­ished behind Spain, but man­aged to fin­ish ahead of nations like Turkey and Belgium.

Por­tu­gal have far more house­hold names than Bosnia after you com­pare their squads, but if you look closer at the sta­tis­tics of a cou­ple of Bosnia play­ers, you will see that they have some dan­ger play­ers. Bosnia have two Wolfs­burg play­ers in their team, a team that have per­formed quite well in the Cham­pi­ons League this sea­son. The first is mid­fielder Zvjez­dan Mis­i­movic, who has scored 16 goals in 46 appear­ances for his coun­try. The sec­ond is striker Edin Dzeko, who has an impres­sive record of 14 goals in 21 inter­na­tional appear­ances. PAOK striker Zla­tan Mus­limovic has an even bet­ter goalscor­ing record with 13 goals in 19 games for Bosnia. These are clearly play­ers that Por­tu­gal will need to look out for. Por­tu­gal have world class play­ers at their dis­posal, such as Ricardo Car­valho, Pepe, Deco, Joao Moutinho and Cris­tiano Ronaldo, but although Ronaldo will be trav­el­ling with squad (much to the delight of Real Madrid!), he is nowhere near fit and is unlikely to fea­ture much, if at all.

I will pre­dict that Por­tu­gal will just scrape through this World Cup play­off, but unless they play to their full poten­tial, Bosnia will be the ones head­ing to South Africa in June.

Writ­ten by Stephen White­ford, a sports writer who blogs about the 2010 World Cup.