Portugal (National Football)

The Portuguese national team are the latest to take on the not-particularly-difficult mannequin challenge.

The "challenge" involves large groups of people (often teams) holding a variety of common poses and staying as still as possible while a cameraman pans the scene.

Unsurprisingly, Cristiano Ronaldo took centre stage in Portugal's effort, posing topless in the middle of the changing room while his teammates froze around him.

All in all, it was a pretty solid effort from the European champions.

[Twitter]

Sorry, Pepe, you are no Cristiano Ronaldo. 

Ronaldo showed off some sweet skills during Portugal training, but Pepe's attempt to match him was less than impressive. 

Stick to defending, Pepe! 

[YouTube, h/t Who Ate All The Pies]

Fifty-eight days. That’s the gap between the apex of Portugal’s footballing achievement—winning the Euro 2016 final—and their next competitive match, as they start out on the road to Russia in a 2018 World Cup qualifier in Switzerland.

Barely has the ticker tape floated down from the sky to the ground and Fernando Santos’ team are back grinding.

That’s how it happens, as Italy’s 2006 World Cup winners could tell you. Having edged out France to lift the trophy in Berlin, they were given a chasing by the same opposition 59 days later in a visceral Euro 2008 qualifier in front of a full house at the Stade de France.

Santos and his players will aim to avoid a similar uncomfortable return to competitive football in Basel.

It is unlikely to be easy. St Jakob-Park is one of the underrated atmospheres in European football, and it will bubble with intent on a night like this.

Portugal have played there twice before, and lost both times—both in Euro 2008, when their second-string side were rolled over by the Swiss in a group dead-rubber, before Luiz Felipe Scolari’s team were subsequently swept away by a stylish Germany in a quarter-final at the same venue.

Moreover, Vladimir Petkovic’s players have given the impression in the buildup to the game that they have a point to prove. Blerim Dzemaili, for example, said Portugal were “lucky” to win the Euros at the squad’s training camp last week (as reported here by Mais Futebol, in Portuguese), pointing out their inability to win any of their group games as they scraped through to the knockout stage.

The Bologna midfielder’s arguments aren’t without foundation. Few teams win major tournaments without luck, and it’s not news to anyone that the margins between success and failure are fine ones.

The thrust of Dzemaili’s sentiment was that Switzerland had been just a penalty shootout away (or, perhaps more accurate, a sliced Granit Xhaka spot-kick away) from facing Portugal in the Marseille quarter-final in Poland’s stead.

The Swiss sense of "it could have been us" is the first example of Portugal’s new status as a target. Not only are they there to be shot at as European champions, but opponents who feel that they weren’t especially "deserving" winners will take great delight in doing so.

Though they can count on the support of a sizeable Portuguese expat community in Switzerland, the start to their qualifying campaign is fraught with danger.

So Santos is smart to make only minor changes to his personnel and—we expect—no changes to his approach at all.

The coach was unapologetic in response to criticisms of Portugal’s style during the Euros, of course. "It doesn't bother me or the players at all,” he said just before the semi-final with Wales, per Reuters (h/t the Evening Standard). “Would I like us to be pretty? Yes. But, in between being pretty and being at home, or being ugly and being here, I prefer to be ugly."

More specifically, the 4-4-2 which served them so well in France will continue, with Ricardo Quaresma and Nani leading the attack in the absence of Cristiano Ronaldo, as the captain nears the end of his recovery from the knee injury that forced him from the field in the Saint-Denis final in tears.

As we’ve discussed in this column before, that tactical system was built specifically to serve Ronaldo—to save him running the channels too much, to get him support in a largely safety-first plan (support which Nani provided expertly during the tournament in France), and to mainly keep him in central areas.

So rather than moving on from Ronaldo, there’s a sense of place-warming—for now, at least.

Moving back to 4-4-2 is an indication, too, that the real business is starting.

Not many conclusions can be drawn from Thursday’s 5-0 friendly win over Gibraltar—not least because of the quality of the opposition—but the system used there, almost a return to 4-3-3, had a sense of the temporary as the champions essentially enjoyed an extended celebration, rather than an especially intense workout.

The switch allowed Santos to include Eder from the start, a popular move in front of the crowd in Porto, giving them a chance to salute the man who scored the historic winner in the final.

The 28-year-old hasn’t looked razor sharp at the start of this season for Lille OGC (his two assists officially recorded include one fluffed control gobbled up by team-mate Younousse Sankhare), and he missed a couple of presentable chances at the Estadio do Bessa to punish Gibraltar further.

Eder will continue to pitch in as a useful squad member, but his moment in the sun will not transform his fortunes at international level.

When it comes to supplementing and eventually replacing Ronaldo, a centre-forward successor has already been anointed. Andre Silva made his senior debut as a half-time substitute for Eder against Gibraltar, and caught the eye.

The 20-year-old, who has started the season superbly for Porto, looked at home straight away, and cleverly created the third goal for fellow debutant Joao Cancelo (Cancelo was the only inclusion in the starting XI who hadn’t been involved in France, underlining the squad’s stability). 

We must exercise a degree of caution, though; the last next great Portugal No. 9, Nelson Oliveira, is now attempting to rebuild his career with Norwich City in the English second tier having faded since a series of promising cameos in Euro 2012.

Silva looks to have his head screwed on, though, and perhaps more importantly, the task of eventually replacing Ronaldo—on either a permanent or a temporary basis—is not as daunting as it once might have been.

That’s one of Santos' greatest achievements in charge of the national side to date. He’s not only created a system to allow an ageing Ronaldo to continue to produce his best, he’s created a genuine team ethic around him so there is a seismic shift is the balance of the side’s strength.

When Ronaldo left Manchester United in 2009, Sir Alex Ferguson was faced with the impossibility of replacing one player who filled several different roles. When the time comes at international level, his replacement will not face the same demands.

Fitting in the group’s burgeoning creative talents will be next. Bernardo Silva, recovered from the injury which sidelined him from the Euros, brought his excellent early-season fettle from AS Monaco into the Gibraltar game and scored his first Portugal goal. Playmaker Rafa, fresh from joining Benfica, will aim to weigh more heavily in the coming qualifiers as well.

For now, those are minor issues. Portugal, still minus Ronaldo, must show how they’re moving away from relying on their talisman in order to overcome the Swiss. In other words, they need to carry on where they left off in the final.

At this rate, it's only a matter of time before Madeira changes its name to Cristiano Ronaldo. 

Not really, but the Portuguese superstar seems to be racking up objects that bear his name on his native island. 

Next up: an airport. 

President of the Regional Government Miguel Albuquerque announced the move to dub the island's main airport "Madeira Cristiano Ronaldo Airport," according to Mundo Deportivo (h/t Mirror). 

Another small reward for helping bring Portugal its first major trophy following a Euro 2016 triumph. 

Add it to the others. 

Cristiano Ronaldo statue unveiled in Madeira, a little bit.. figure-hugging [via @alexqueiros] http://t.co/JB83jvJne1 pic.twitter.com/TOd3NNddLF

— Bleacher Report UK (@br_uk) December 21, 2014

Portugal's Euro 2016-winning coach, Fernando Santos, has committed his future to the country, signing a new deal to remain for four more years.

The Press Association (via ESPN FC) confirmed the contract news on Tuesday.    

The manager took his Cristiano Ronaldo-led unit to glory in France after it appeared the Portuguese might struggle to compete with Europe's stronger nations.

The 61-year-old masterminded victories over Croatia, Poland and Wales in the knockout games before shocking the hosts in the final.

The Portuguese Football Federation announced Santos will remain with them through the 2018 World Cup and Euro 2020 campaigns (h/t the Press Association).

The Lisbon-born manager replaced Paulo Bento in 2014 after four years as coach of Greece and numerous club management roles, including stints at Porto, Sporting Lisbon and Benfica.

Santos spent an extended period with PAOK FC in the Greek league from 2007-2010 before taking the reins of the country's national side.

Santos is one of the less fashionable coaches in world football, but his stock has rocketed over the past month.

He made Portugal a tight defensive unit throughout the European Championships campaign and utilised his attacking pair of Ronaldo and Nani to its maximum.  

Portugal didn't appear to have the depth to win a major title, but Santos' tactics have been perfect to breed success on the international stage.

The red and green ticker tape has long since been picked up from the grass of the Stade de France and the streets of Lisbon, and so what now for Portugal?

Well, in short, rest.

Whatever your opinion of this Portugal team and their performances in winning Euro 2016, you can’t deny that the effort they put into winning the tournament means Fernando Santos’ men deserve a well-earned break over the next few weeks.

From Real Madrid to Southampton to Lille, whichever clubs these players belong to can’t expect to see them back quickly, and nor should they.

Santos deserves a bit of downtime, too. Even the grizzled, somewhat dour coach was reduced to jigging in delight once Eder fired that unstoppable and unexpected winner past Hugo Lloris in extra time. It was most out of character for a man who had barely smiled in the six matches before the final.

As you’ll have read elsewhere by now, his and Portugal’s triumph was one of organisation over inspiration, as a country traditionally renowned for producing creative, attacking forces achieved their finest hour thanks to much more rudimentary means.

Yet now they are European champions, they will become fresh meat for others to hunt, starting when the 2018 FIFA World Cup qualifiers get under way in September.

There, Portugal have been placed in Group B, alongside Switzerland, Euro 2016 opponents Hungary, Latvia, Faroe Islands and Andorra. It's a fairly kind group on paper and one that doesn’t look to be providing too many obstacles on Portugal’s route to Russia in two years’ time.

But while qualification is more than achievable, Santos would be right to strike a note of caution with his players as they prepare for the battles ahead.

As the tournament they’ve just won has shown, the gap between the haves and the have-nots in international football seems to be narrowing all the time, with Euro 2016 an advert for just how far defensive organisation and a willingness to work hard can get you. Portugal are suddenly a scalp now, and their group opponents will see anything gained from them as a bonus.

You could say they might be about to become victims of their own success, and their group opponents will already be working out ways to better them.

The Swiss were disappointing in France, but they at least have players capable of producing the spectacular like Stoke City’s Xherdan Shaqiri, while Hungary almost knocked Portugal out of the tournament in the group stage during that remarkable 3-3 draw in Lyon. There would have been no Paris, no Eder and no jigging Santos if Cristiano Ronaldo hadn’t levelled the scores in the 62nd minute.

In addition to all this, there is the question of numbers.

With only nine automatic spots in Russia available for group winners and eight of the nine best runners-up going into the play-offs, that means only 13 of the 54 nations who’ll start the qualifying process will make it. Just over half of the sides that were in France, in other words.

There will be no bloated tournament here, but that only means it’ll be tougher for the established elite to make it.

Santos—the manager of Greece between 2010 and 2014—would have worked with plenty of the Greek players who, when reigning European champions in 2004, then went and failed to win any of their first three qualifiers for the 2006 World Cup, eventually finishing fourth in their group behind Ukraine, Turkey and Denmark.

His side don’t face the same level of opposition here, but they will have to guard against complacency if there isn’t to be an initial struggle or uneasiness about their next two years, which will also include Confederations Cup participation in Russia in 2017.

What Santos will value is that the core of his squad is still likely to be kept together.

Ronaldo shows no sign of slowing down for his country, and he’ll captain a squad in which plenty of young talents have just enhanced their reputations. The only two players in the Euro 2016 squad who probably won’t be there in Russia are Ricardo Carvalho and Bruno Alves, but the recent displays of Pepe and Jose Fonte in defence have shoved them to one side anyway.

Will Santos need to change tactics to make it to Russia? Perhaps, but they are likely to be more of an evolutionary move than a revolutionary one.

He’s got the crest of a wave to ride first, though, preferably on a relaxing beach somewhere. 

The party was well and truly under way in Lisbon on Monday, even prompting some of Portugal's Euro 2016 heroes to show off their musical sides.

Fernando Santos' side won their first major tournament with a 1-0 extra-time victory over host nation France on Sunday night and returned to Portugal as national heroes.

Among the chaos, Nani and Renato Sanches stole the show with a beatbox performance:

And then Cristiano Ronaldo took over the microphone:

It's the biggest party in the world right now—and don't expect it to end anytime soon.

[YouTube]

As he waited to be interviewed by the host broadcaster in the Stade de France tunnel after Portugal’s historic Euro 2016 win, Cristiano Ronaldo craned his neck forward and stared into the camera. “How do I look?” he asked, tightening his cheeks and exposing that famous, gleaming grin. “Shiny,” came the reply from behind the camera. Ronaldo raised his eyebrows and laughed.

It was a strange night for Portugal’s captain in Saint-Denis—a night in which lots of the cliches about him were confirmed, and a host of others were consigned to the rubbish bin. Yes, he still has something of a hero complex, which was plain in the way he tried to carry on way past the point at which his match was clearly done.

The 16-minute lag between Dimitri Payet's challenge that injured Ronaldo's knee and the moment when the Portugal captain was finally substituted was painful viewing, as he fought against nature as best he could, hobbling across the turf. It was heavily reminiscent of his efforts in the 2014 FIFA World Cup, in fact.

Yet elsewhere, Ronaldo was the picture of the team linchpin, rather than the distant individual superstar. He made his re-emergence onto the field at the end of the 90 minutes, before the beginning of extra time. He then beckoned the group around him for a team talk after speaking to a number of them on an individual basis.

This was the public face of a role that had begun in the Portugal dressing room at half-time, with his tears of disappointment barely dry on his cheeks. “Cristiano had fantastic words for us,” said right–back Cedric after the game, as reported here by The Independent’s Jack Pitt-Brooke.“He gave us a lot of confidence. He said ‘listen people, I am sure we will win. So stay together and fight for it.’ He was fantastic, his attitude was unbelievable.”

It wasn’t the first time in the tournament that Ronaldo had showed himself as the team’s moral, as well as technical, leader. There was the famous footage of him convincing Joao Moutinho, another of the squad’s more experienced figures, to take a kick in the penalty shootout against Poland in Marseille (see below).

What followed on the initial encouragements of Sunday night, though, was for many the most extraordinary sight of Ronaldo during the tournament. The sight was more striking than the delicious finish against Hungary that opened his account for the summer, or even the prodigious leap that enabled him to head in against Wales: his performance on the Stade de France touchline.

Ronaldo was a man possessed, especially as Portuguese eyes around the stadium looked up towards the clock on the scoreboard after Eder’s goal put them in front. At one point, he even grabbed his coach Fernando Santos with a total mania.

In the moments directly after Eder’s strike, he wandered off along the touchline to briefly agonise on his own, echoing the scenes in the recent documentary, Ronaldo, in which his mother Dolores is a tortured, anxious spectator watching her son play on television with close family.

Up level with Santos on the edge of the technical area, matching (and even surpassing) his coach’s every exhortation to his players, it was a football version of the omnipresent LeBron James’ own touchline coaching, calling every play, every detail as he loomed over erstwhile Cleveland Cavaliers tactician David Blatt.

The big difference here is, unlike with LeBron and Blatt, Ronaldo is not planning an overthrow. The experienced Santos understands what Ronaldo’s role is and what it should be. Like his predecessor Paulo Bento, Santos knows that Portugal will get the best out of the talisman by playing for him.

The only thing is, what that entails has changed enormously in the last few years. Bento, who already had a relationship with Ronaldo after their paths crossed at Sporting Clube de Portugal, concentrated on keeping it simple. By employing him in the same role as Real Madrid did, starting on the left with the freedom to burst from deep and come inside, he got performances for Portugal out of Ronaldo far more faithful to his club form than previous manager Carlos Queiroz had ever managed to.

Ronaldo is no longer that player. Part of Santos’ mastery of Euro 2016 was in the safety-first tactics that so frustrated a large part of the continent watching on. Yet those tactics, as previously discussed in this column, were also about getting Ronaldo closer to goal, sparing him too much running and providing him with adequate support, which is what the 4-4-2 did.

The captain no longer comes to get the ball, but that doesn’t matter. Even before he started to hit the goal trail in the Euro, the supporting cast were doing their job, which seems to have gone unnoticed in many quarters. Ronaldo has 20 efforts on goal in the first two games of the Euro (not all from direct free-kicks, before you ask), so his team-mates were clearly doing something right.

This should work going forward. Ronaldo’s physical strength and his phenomenal finishing power will sustain him as the explosiveness starts to leave his legs, which is already happening.

Like Steven Gerrard gradually moving into a deeper role in Liverpool’s midfield, it is something that the player himself has not found easy to accept, however. It was perhaps buried under his ungracious comments about the opposition, but as recently as after the first game of the tournament against Iceland, Ronaldo told journalists that his preferred position was on the left.

What this victory does, however, is prove Santos right, and it appears Ronaldo has begun to grasp that. He needs his team-mates now more than ever as he evolves, but they need him, too. He has been a leader for Portugal for many years, but he is becoming a different sort of leader. In the future, he is unlikely to sweep teams away single-handedly, like he did Sweden in the play-off for the 2014 World Cup.

He will, however, hold his team-mates accountable to the highest possible standards—not unlike, in some ways, a fellow obsessive in his former Manchester United team-mate Roy Keane. In turn, the likes of Renato Sanches and Bernardo Silva, who missed the Euros through injury, will provide him with the chances to augment his legend.

Portugal always honours its legends, as the players showed on Monday when they posed with the trophy and photo of the late, great Eusebio. The biggest compliment you can pay Ronaldo, certainly from a Portuguese perspective, is that he is a more than worthy successor to the King.

The Portuguese national team returned home on Monday with the UEFA European Championship trophy and were greeted by thousands of adoring fans in Lisbon.

Eder’s stunning strike in extra time handed the Selecao a 1-0 win and their maiden major title, with the team overcoming an early injury to captain Cristiano Ronaldo to break the hearts of host nation France.

Needless to say, the day after a historic night for Portugal, there were plenty of celebrations in the country’s capital city.

As we can see courtesy of BBC Sport, the players arrived back on home soil bathed in the colours of the national flag:

Per Peter Abbott of the British Embassy, the team’s transport was accompanied by the nation’s air force, too:

When they eventually emerged from the plane, the players were ushered onto a bus with the trophy and embarked on their victory parade of the capital city.

The bus included all the heroes from the tournament, with Ronaldo waving the country’s red-and-green flag, as well as defensive colossus Pepe and head coach Fernando Santos, who masterminded the team’s brilliant win.

The Portista Twitter feed posted the following clip of the bus making its way toward the city centre flanked by adoring supporters:

Although the players were keen to celebrate with the fans, there was some official business to attend to first, as they headed off to meet the country’s president, Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa.

In recognition of their achievement, the squad and staff members all picked up special commendations.

“I have to praise everyone,” said De Sousa to Portuguese broadcaster RTP, via Reuters (h/t the Guardian) after the team's triumph. “I will commemorate them with the Order of Merit of Commanders—that is a decree that has never been given to the national team.”

Here is a look at the squad receiving paper copies of those accolades:

Meanwhile, Ronaldo posted the following clip on his Instagram page, as the players looked down at the mass of supporters gathered outside the Palacio de Belem:

He also took to Twitter to share this clip taken during the parade:

While Portugal received plenty of criticism during the Euros for the style of play they utilised, scenes like the ones shown are what football is all about. While much was made of the fact they only won one game in 90 minutes at the competition, they were also unbeaten at the finals; evidently, that's crucial in tournament football.

And regardless of how they played, these players and their accompanying staff have forever etched themselves into the history of the country. They are the first football team to win a major tournament for Portugal, and it’s no surprise the nation has decided to celebrate alongside them.