Euro 2024: the quarters, part one; Portugal sacrificed at the altar of one man's ego, yet again

Portugal are out of the Euros, a brilliantly talented squad of players undone by a manager too cowardly to tell their fading star some home truths.

Admit it. It wasn’t quite the entertaining ending that you’d been hoping for, was it? Perhaps he might balloon a penalty kick into orbit, or get sent off over punching the referee for not giving him two attempts at a free-kick after tripping over on the run up and bumping his head against the ball. Oh Missediano Penaldo, we hardly knew ye. But this was pretty good wasn’t it? Blazing the ball wildly over the crossbar from seven yards out was pretty funny, wasn’t it?

Forty years ago this summer, France and Portugal played out the greatest match in the history of the Euros, and perhaps one of the most dramatic ever played in a major tournament anywhere. But on this occasion, all they could manage was a wan tribute act to the team of the carré magique.

Somewhere in the distance, the ghost of Michel Platini’s reputation wailed in anguish. And at the end of it all came a mild feeling of dissatisfaction. Okay, fair enough, Bidenaldo’s self-penned narrative might have come to a grinding halt mid-sentence, but it’s difficult to make a substantive case that France deserved a place in the semi-finals, to any meaningful extent.

France are five games into this tournament and have still failed to score a goal themselves from open play. The answer to the question of why this is happening is pretty clear in the squad list. France have three strikers who’ve scored 149 goals between them, but the problem with this is that two of them - Antoine Griezmann and Olivier Giroud - have a combined age of 70 while the other currently has a broken nose and is currently only working at about 70% efficacy.

These aren’t the only forwards that France have taken to the tournament, but the other five have only scored 19 between them, and eight of those have come from Kingsley Coman, who’s taken 57 games to get that many. The entire defence and midfield have scored 25 between them. Giroud is barely getting on the pitch and Griezmann continues to operate as though he had an unfortunate encounter with a witch shortly before flying out to Germany.

France’s shape improved a little when they swapped Griezmann out for Ousmane Dembele midway through the second half, but this was ultimately another 120 minutes of thin gruel from Didier Deschamps. With France itself currently undergoing something approaching a nervous breakdown, perhaps it’s appropriate that the national football team should be creaking in this way. This is turning into a somewhat unedifying summer for the country in several different respects.

But talking of unedifying, it would be remiss not to briefly return to the subject of Bidenaldo, the oldest swinger in town, the old man of hoy vey, whose final footballing psychodrama taps directly into society’s slightly ghoulish interest in the decline of great empires. He wasn’t the ultimate cause of their defeat last night. If there was such a patsy it was probably Joao Felix, whose missed penalty was ultimately the tangible difference between the two teams.

But then… what effect did it have on the team to have this old codger shuffling around up front, demanding to take free-kicks and then blasting them straight into the wall or ballooning the ball wildly over the crossbar like some sort of footballing Abe Simpson? He used to be with ‘it’, but then they changed what ‘it’ was. Now what he’s with isn’t ‘it’ anymore and what’s ‘it’ seems weird and scary. It’ll happen to you!

What a waste. This was a lavishly talented Portugal squad, a group of players plenty capable of winning this entire tournament. But the legacy of their performance this summer will, if anything, be a fabulously talented collection of players sacrificed at the altar of the ego of this one man who’s spent the last twenty years demolishing his legacy as he built it.

And no, none of this reflects particularly well on Roberto Martinez, whose abject cowardice in apparently not having taken his car keys off him for his own safety ended up going at least some of the way towards twanging his team out of the tournament and quite possibly himself out of a job. Who would ever have guessed that the man who couldn’t make anything much out of the lavish talents of the Belgium team of the last decade wouldn’t have the gumption to sort this lot out either?

This is the price you pay. Goncalo Ramos and Diogo Jota sat on the bench twiddling their thumbs while Pensiano Daynaldo trundled around on the pitch at a pace more suitable to a game of walking football. This old giffer’s third or fourth farewell tour ran out of road well before it got to that final date in Berlin next week, and the result of all this France are still in it, even though they frankly don’t deserve to be. It is, as a wise man with a luxurious moustache said repeatedly throughout the 1980s, a funny old game.