There Is Only One Sinnacle

Not enough chicken bones in Bosnia it appears as Portugal has rightfully booked their place in the 2010 World Cup. Credit to Bosnia who struck with their game plan and were unlucky not to have scored in Portugal but the better team has earned the right to play in South Africa.

This World Cup qualifying can’t be considered a success with having to back door their way in but there are some positives to be taken. Portugal only conceded five goals in twelve total qualifying matches. Four of those goals were against Denmark and two out of the four were in extra time.

Most of the credit for that should go to Ricardo Carvalho and Bruno Alves who are the backbone of this team. Everyone knows how highly I think of Carvalho so this is nothing new but he is the type of player you can go to war with. You know he can be counted on in the big matches. It’s like he was secretly born Italian. Alves in his own right is a top ten defender whose goals helped Portugal on their way to South American. Throw Pepe into the mix and you have a defensive unit which will be very hard to break through.

Offensively, gone are the days of Figo and Rui Costa putting in crosses and through balls you or I could score on but one of the weakness of being an international coach is only having a team for one week at a time every couple of months. It makes things difficult when you are trying to instill your own brand of football like Carlos Queiroz is attempting. With three weeks of training before the World Cup hopefully everything will come together head of the World Cup.

Now I will end this post with the Raul Meireles goals which all but ended Bosnia and Herzegovina World Cup dream. What a feeling of bliss seeing this goal go in.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 18th, 2009 at 6:04 pm and is filed under Main. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.