Paraguay Football Fans

C.Ronaldo’s series of impressive performances helped Portugal on clinching their spot in the 2014 World Cup with the star of Real Madrid scoring a hat-trick during a qualification match against Sweden as well making another standout display in a friendly match against Cameroon.

From there on out it was a downhill path for the former Manchester United player as he could not continue pushing Portugal to the next stages of the 2014 World Cup and had to settle with a 3rd spot in Group G which wasn’t enough for them to advance any further.

According to the Portuguese winger Ricardo Quaresma, one of the main problems that Portugal had was that the team relied on C.Ronaldo too much.

“We cannot just put pressure on Cristiano and he does not play alone. I think we Portuguese put too much pressure on just one player. The team is not just Cristiano. No player in the world can solve a game if you do not have colleagues behind him. I think that we Portuguese have failed [at the World Cup] because we put too much pressure on one player only. I think also we failed because all the other players who were next to Cristiano maybe didn’t feel comfortable about everyone talking about just one player and not the rest of the squad.”

Ricardo Quaresma is a former player of Inter Milan who has represented and played for Portugal at the international stage as he has been featured in qualifying matches and he was included in the provisional list of the head coach Paulo Bento but when the tactician decided to cut his list to only 23 player, Quaresma was excluded from the squad.

Paraguay might not have been able to qualify for the upcoming FIFA World Cup 2014, but, they are a very talented unit and they proved that yesterday night in a practice match against one of the World’s strongest teams France in Nice.

Victor Genes’ boys were trailing by 0-1 for most parts of the match, but, at no point of time did they look like giving up. They kept looking for that leveller right through the game and finally managed to score it in the 89th minute to stop the Les Blues on a draw.

This was the second practice game for France ahead of the World Cup. In their first one a few days ago, they had secured a heavy win against Norway. They would have hoped to do the same against Paraguay too, but, it wasn’t to be. The men in White and Red pushed the hosts to the limit.

France would not have been too disappointed with this kind of game though. You like yourself to be tested a little bit before a big tournament and Paraguay did the same to the Les Blues yesterday.

Two of the main French players, Karim Benzema and Franck Ribery had their names in the match squad, but, neither was sent onto the Ground by the manager Didier Deschamps.
At the end of the match, when the reporters asked Deschamps about Ribery’s fitness, he said, “As I said earlier, we are looking to get him fit for our next practice game. Our medical Staff is working very hard on him and hopefully, they would get him back on park come next Sunday.”

The Les Blues will play their third and final practice match before the World Cup against Jamaica next weekend. That match is going to take place at Lille.