Will Portugal Overcome Bosnia Without Ronaldo?

Por­tu­gal will most likely be miss­ing Cris­tiano Ronaldo when it hosts Bosnia-Herzegovina on 11/14/09 as it looks to build some momen­tum prior to the return leg in Bosnia on the 18th of Novem­ber. Unfor­tu­nately for the Por­tuguese the lat­est report claims Ronaldo will be out for about a month which means he will not fea­ture in both matches for the national team.

It is hard to deter­mine the extent of the dam­age that Por­tu­gal will suf­fer as a result of his absence yet his per­for­mances dur­ing the qual­i­fiers have been mediocre at best by his stan­dards. Regard­less of pre­vi­ous dis­plays, miss­ing out on the cur­rent world player of the year is def­i­nitely not an encour­ag­ing sign, in par­tic­u­lar when the oppo­nent is a dan­ger­ous Bosn­ian side full of offen­sive men­ace. While Bosnia’s defense remains sus­cep­ti­ble, which would have meant more chances for Ronaldo to shine, the country’s attack fea­tures some lethal for­wards in the shape of Edin Dzeko (pic­tured above right), Vedad Ibi­se­vic, and Zvjez­dan Mis­i­movic. The Bosn­ian national team reg­is­tered 25 goals in the group stage, trail­ing only Eng­land, Spain and Ger­many in the goals scored by any national team in Euro­pean qual­i­fiers. It would be wrong to assume the Bosn­ian team is lim­ited to a potent attack although the defense has leaked 13 goals dur­ing the cam­paign. The Bosni­ans also have the advan­tage of play­ing the return leg on home soil.

On the other hand and despite the likely absence of Ronaldo, Por­tu­gal will still have its plethora of stars with Chelsea’s Deco, Man­ches­ter United’s Nani and of course defend­ers Pepe (Real Madrid), Jose Bosingwa & Ricardo Car­valho (both Chelsea), Atletico de Madrid’s Simao Sabrosa. The Por­tuguese side might have sneaked into the play-offs after a stut­ter­ing start, yet the fix­ture list fea­tured a sin­gle defeat and revealed a water-tight defense which con­ceded a mere give goals in a group which also included Den­mark and Swe­den. It will be an inter­est­ing tus­sle between Portugal’s stingy defense and Bosnia’s elu­sive attack force. Nev­er­the­less, it would be wrong to under­es­ti­mate the set of skills that defines Portugal’s cre­ative play­ers such as Deco. One fac­tor that may serve in Bosnia’s favour is the expe­ri­ence of the shrewd coach Miroslav Blaze­vic who led Croa­tia to the semi-finals in France 1998 when the French elim­i­nated the Croa­t­ians on route to the World Cup triumph.

With Ronaldo miss­ing, it will be inter­est­ing to see how the rest of the Por­tuguese play­ers react and whether they will work hard together in order to off­set his absence. On the other side, a hun­gry oppo­nent in the shape of the Bosn­ian play­ers will try to feed off the frenzy that has been cre­ated by the advance­ment to this stage of the qual­i­fiers. Let the fire­works begin in what should be a crack­ing game between two sides more than capa­ble of scor­ing on their day.

Tagged as: Bosingwa, Bosnia, Cristiano Ronaldo, Deco, Denmark, Dzeko, Nani, Pepe, Portugal, Simao, Spain, Sweden