Portugal: no more Alcácer Quibir!
AL-RAYAAN – The World Cup narrowed. There are only six teams left in the competition, and I’m currently in the press bench at Estádio da Cidade da Educação, facing yet another Brazilian disappointment, excitement for Croatia, which made it to the semi-finals after the great celebrations they celebrated following a draw ( 1-1) after 120 minutes. That night, from Argentina and the Netherlands, one more will return home, so that, on the next Tuesday and Wednesday, the games that will give access to the final will be played, a goal that will be extraordinary for Portugal since, on only two occasions, in 1966 and in 2006, it managed to reach such an advanced stage of the competition. After the revolutionary victory, let’s call it that, over Switzerland, and revolutionary because the coach Fernando Santos decided to throw Cristiano Ronaldo to the bench, that player that we all detected that had the ownership served by some kind of usucaption right, a certain euphoria took hold of the Portuguese who are here in Qatar. There aren’t many, it’s natural, life is expensive, the price of tickets has now started to skyrocket until reaching prohibitive values, the population laments the fact that, in the first meetings, they got cheap tickets and that bodo to the poor ended abruptly . Anyway, a World Cup is probably the biggest business on the planet in terms of ticket sales, surpassing even the Olympic Games, and from this there are only six more games left when you open the pages of your newspaper.
It is somehow unconscious to face Morocco as a pleasant opponent, even after that superb victory by Portugal against Switzerland, in Lusail, by very rare numbers for a national team in the final stages: 6-1. First because, I would be able to bet singles against doubles, as in Tom Mix’s books, that no other team will condemn itself so bovinely to being cut by the scruff as that group of Swiss who gave the feeling that they had not the slightest idea of what was going on. there to do. His coach, Murat Yakin, apologized that a virus had hit many of his players and that, because of that, he was unable to take their performance. It may sound like an excuse, but the truth is that Qatar is being invaded by the most diverse types of viruses a little everywhere and it seems that they use air conditioning installations (a plague!, a plague!) in the style of highways , damn them! It is also somewhat indecent to attribute the merits of this unprecedented victory to the fact that Ronaldo was not in the starting line-up. It’s not worth beating the blind man any more, the captain of the national team is trying to fight against the effects of time and the damage it has caused to his physical structure, but time is as insensitive as it is irreversible and not even Tony de Matos managed to make him would go back. Of course, after the three goals scored, Gonçalo Ramos will hardly be in the starting line-up today, at 3pm in Lisbon, at Estádio de Al Thumama. I would be astonished and even disappointed. He seized the opportunity with remarkable class. Deserves more.
hyperactive morocco
Ask me about the great individuals of the Moroccan national team and I won’t be able to distinguish them in the midst of excited, hyperactive football, and moved by vertiginous patriotic fanaticism. Of course there’s Zyiech (Chelsea), Hakimi (Paris Saint-Germain) or Amrabat (Fiorentina), but it’s surely the way they move collectively that becomes dangerous for their opponents as they apparently want to run and run and run with their outside and the dependent languages up to the descendants. I have no doubt that they will demand a lot from Fernando Santos’ team, there are many good players to beat Morocco, especially from a physical point of view, and that the almost training pace required by the Portuguese as they crossed the Swiss Alps will not take place against the Lions make atlas. Furthermore, as of last Tuesday, it was easy to see in the long dawn on the streets of Doha and in the huge party that took place in Souq-Waqif, the city’s big market, how Saudis, Tunisians and Qataris (or Pakistanis and Bengalis for them) united in a moving Arab front, electing the Moroccan team as the representative of all the peoples of the region, predisposing themselves to carry it as far as possible. That Portugal is better and has better players, I don’t even argue. But it was also like that in 1986, in Guadalajara, and we suffered that absurd and incomprehensible defeat against the Moroccans (1-3), at a time when the Portuguese team was coming apart at the seams while barricading itself in a zebroid to say the least. With that very characteristic exaggeration that gave his prose an unmistakable touch of humor, Nelson Rodrigues called Brazil’s defeat by Uruguay in Maracanã in 1950 the «Hiroshima of Brazilian Football». It doesn’t hurt, therefore, to consider the Lusitanian failure of the 11th of June, at Estádio Jalisco, as the Alcácer-Quibir of Portuguese football. And, as my dear Manuel Alegre once wrote: “No more Alcácer Quibir/It is necessary to have roots again/A ground to till/A ground to flourish”. Maybe Portugal will be able to bloom again today!