Portugal Go from Triumph to Planning Post-Cristiano Ronaldo Future

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 …

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