Cristiano Ronaldo Still Waiting for Platform to Shine with Portugal

Let’s make no bones about it. Euro 2016 is well and truly up for grabs. Germany probably remain slight favourites, even if they have had a few issues during qualifying. Spain are still striving to find their most imperious selves. Host nation France are still evidently a work in progress.

Portugal may be within touching distance of reaching next summer’s tournament finals in France, but there is little feeling that they can be a credible part of the top group of candidates. Monday night’s dramatic win in Albania made it five wins in five competitive matches for coach Fernando Santos, but there is little euphoria for his team back home.

This is despite the fact that they will have the best player there in the shape of Cristiano Ronaldo. He may turn 31 in February, but there’s no sense of the French summer being his last stand on the international stage.

His level of fitness, his enduring aptitude and his phenomenal drive mean that with him fully fit (not, in other words, struggling to physically function as he did during the 2014 World Cup), Portugal retain some sort of hope of challenging.

The quality of the supporting cast remains the question, despite those positive results. Ricardo Quaresma and Miguel Veloso, who combined for the latter’s late winner in Elbasan on Monday, are nevertheless among those seen by many Portuguese fans as part of the problem.

Santos’ predecessor Paulo Bento was highly resistant to change, but if the new man has tweaked his recipe, it’s been with the recall of a series of veterans whom many thought they’d seen the last of, with Jose Bosingwa and Ricardo Carvalho the prominent names among them. Thirteen different players aged 30 or over have been used by Santos during the qualifying campaign to date.

Ronaldo is one of those, of course, but he’s an exception, and the lack of useful foils increases his burden of responsibility. Eliseu, a very watchable and engaging footballer but nowhere near being an international-class left-back, just doesn’t have the same level of intuition with Ronaldo that his now-erstwhile Real Madrid teammate Fabio Coentrao does.

Coentrao is currently injured, but Portugal are clamouring for fresh blood. It’s not as if it isn’t there. The under-21 squad that Rui Jorge led to the final of the summer’s European Championship in Czech Republic was stuffed full with bright talent, but Santos has been reluctant to fully embrace it.

For the moment, that excellent side is a ghost squad. They’re there, but they’re not there. Ivan Cavaleiro and Ricardo Horta have both seen minutes in this qualifying campaign, but they weren’t part of the latest call-up. Raphael Guerreiro remained on the bench. William Carvalho, who won player of the tournament in the summer, is currently injured.

Joao Mario and the sensational Bernardo Silva were both involved in this squad, with the former starting against France and the latter slotting into the XI in Albania.

Bernardo, who was outstanding for Monaco last season in his first full term of top-level football, was one of the few to pop his head above the fog of mediocrity in Albania, along with Ronaldo. It was disappointing to see him taken off after 65 minutes of his first competitive start, with Portugal still needing a goal from somewhere.

Elsewhere, 23-year-old Danilo Pereira, the Porto midfielder also on his first competitive start, was excellent and flew the flag for youth.

In an interview with L’Equipe to preview last week’s game, Santos defended his policy of recalling a host of 30-somethings, saying it was a “guarantee” of having players at his disposal who are mentally prepared—a crucial element, the coach thinks, when there are only a few days in which to work with the squad to get them in the zone for important games.

The argument is convincing to a certain extent. The essence of what has made Carvalho such a top-class centre-back, certainly, is largely intact, even if by his admission it is encased in a body that is creaking more than ever. A Bola’s Miguel Sousa Tavares wrote on Tuesday that “Santos’ choices are the only ones he has,” arguing that the end justifies the means.

Yet, if the new coach inherited a difficult situation, with Bento having lost the group opener to Albania, it was a better one than that which his predecessor had to deal with. Bento took charge in October 2010 with just one point from two games. He responded by priming his side to attack. Santos has done the exact opposite.

Ronaldo bears no real responsibility for this. Since Bento’s reign, there’s little reason in the old (and outdated) argument of the captain not producing his club form at international level. Even after coming off second-best in his duel with Albania’s Etrit Berisha, he has five goals in five qualifiers in the current campaign, and they’ve all been ones that have mattered; the towering last-gasp header to turn a turgid display in Denmark into three points, the late winner to break Armenia in Faro and the hat-trick to seal a victory in the return match in Yerevan in June.

It has also been argued—although mainly outside Portugal, it must be noted—that Ronaldo should take one for the team in moving out of his preferred role, wide left cutting in, into more of a natural centre-forward position, as he did in Albania on Monday. The thinking here is that Portugal are well-manned in wide areas, mainly thanks to the Sporting Clube de Portugal academy from which Ronaldo and Nani graduated, while they are not so plentifully stocked with No. 9's.

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It’s half right. Anyone watching Friday’s friendly with France will have once again said to themselves that Eder is certainly not a threat to quality defences, however good he looked when he first burst onto the Champions League scene with Braga back in 2012. Nelson Oliveira, a Benfica product who looked so promising months before that in Euro 2012, has failed to kick on in disappointing loan spells at Rennes and Swansea.

Oliveira is now on loan in the English second-tier, at Nottingham Forest. There, he will meet Lucas Joao, who left Nacional to join Sheffield Wednesday this summer. That Lucas was asked in all seriousness about his aims to reach Santos’ side in the future in a recent interview with Mais Futebol (in Portuguese) says much about the paucity of current options.

Yet, Portugal aren’t a reliable or expansive enough side to think about anything other than getting the best out of their best player, which was Bento’s plan, too—using Ronaldo in the same role he plays for Real Madrid. At least it allows him a scope beyond relying on unpredictable service.

Maybe Santos, who knows Greek football very well, thinks that a solid defence allied to Ronaldo’s brilliance could work in France, providing a subtle spin on what Greece did at Euro 2004, at Portugal’s expense. It may be too close to Euro 2016 to prepare anything more expansive.