Poland 1 Portugal 1 (Portugal win 5-3 on penalties)
Marseille: There have been hundreds of games when Cristiano Ronaldo has performed better than he did in Marseille on Thursday night but the biggest star in the European game is going into the semi-finals of Euro 2016, and this time he can thank some of Portugal’s supporting cast.
A penalty in the shoot-out from the Poland midfielder Jakub Blaszczykowski that was saved by Rui Patricio, the eighth between the two teams, and the only one that did not go in out of nine, was the deciding factor in the end.
It was a poor quarter-final, lit up by a brilliant first-half performance from the 18-year-old Renato Sanches who scored Portugal’s first-half equaliser. In the end, it came down to substitute Ricardo Quaresma to score Portugal’s decisive penalty the last of five of which Ronaldo had buried the first. It is the end for Poland and Robert Lewandowski, who scored Poland’s goal in the second minute of the game. Sanches is the youngest player to appear at these European championships and had a major impact on the first half.
He is now the youngest player to have scored in a knockout round at any championship and looked every inch the prodigy whom Bayern Munich have agreed a deal for said to be worth around £60 million (Dh292.7 million). The fastest goal of the euros and the second fastest of all time in the championships — a mere 100 seconds from kick-off started with a bad misjudgement from the Southampton right back Cedric Soares who allowed a big cross-field hit from his opposite number Lukasz Piszczek to bounce over his head and into the pocket of space that Kamil Grosicki was running into. For a while it seemed that Portugal would never find their rhythm at all.
They struggled to make any inroads on Poland and always ran the risk of being hit on the counter-attack. Only in the last 15 minutes of the first-half did Portugal gain the upper hand, and they did so largely thanks to the playmaking of the brilliant Sanches who was at the centre of everything.
The goal was a peach, helped in by a deflection off Paris St-Germain’s incoming midfielder Grzegorz Krychowiak. Sanches took the ball on the edge of the area, exchanged passes with Nani and switched it from right to left foot before unleashing a shot at the near post.
It took a slight deviation and beat Lukasz Fabianski into the corner. For reasons that were by no means clear, the Portugal coach Fernando Santos moved Sanches out to the right wing for the second half, and later the left, where he failed to have anything like the impact he had made before the break. On the few occasions he did get on the ball he looked very sharp and committed opponents but he was on it too little.
Portugal lost their way a little too with the best chance of the early stages after the break squandered by Ronaldo who was played in down the left by Eliseu and elected to shoot rather than cut the ball back to Joao Mario — to no one’s great surprise.
Ronaldo misjudged another cross into the area and the ball came off his standing foot and away from goal. Worse was to come in the 86th minute when he swung a left boot at substitute Joao Moutinho’s flighted ball over the top of the Poland defence and missed it completely just as you anticipated the bulge of the net. In the heat of the Mediterranean coast, at the end of a long season, penalties were not a surprise. Portugal have just one conventional win in five games in this tournament, against Croatia in the second round, but they are in the final four.
