Last 16: Portugal 0 Slovenia 0 (Portugal win 3-0 on penalties)
Diogo Jota runs into the box, collides with Vanja Drkušić, and falls over. Penalty to Portugal. At last. This is what we came for.
Cristiano Ronaldo is about to shoot at goal for the seventh time in the match. Four of the previous six were free kicks. Now the greatest living goalscorer faces Jan Oblak. 105 grim goalless minutes in Frankfurt have all been building to this. The whole football world is watching this moment.
He shoots. Oblak dives left. Pushes it on to the post and away.
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Ronaldo is the most famous person in the world, with nearly a billion followers across various platforms. The excitement at seeing someone so famous in the flesh builds on the excitement of being among other people who are also excited to be seeing him in the flesh in a feedback loop and people work themselves into a frenzy.
No matter what he does, the stadium crowd loves it. He does his free-kick ritual – assumes power stance, scooches up shorts, blasts it over bar – the crowd goes wild. He does it again, and again, and again, they keep loving it.
As the crowd cheered a tackle he made on Slovenia’s Petar Stojanovic, you felt they could not have been more excited if, by some astonishing turn of events, they were watching Taylor Swift herself playing up front for Portugal and delivering this exact performance.
And make no mistake, this would have been a pretty good performance for Taylor Swift, who at 34 has never played at this level. Compared to the other forwards at Euro 2024, the only thing that stood out about Ronaldo was the overreaction of the crowd to everything he did.
Outside the stadium the billions on social media were also reacting to everything Ronaldo did. When he missed that penalty every football fan’s social media feeds – already teeming with comparisons between Ronaldo and Joe Biden – suddenly flooded with reactions ranging from “hahhahahahaha” to “lolololooool”.
Anyone can miss a penalty, but only Ronaldo can miss one and safely assume that literally billions of people around the world are laughing at him at this moment. Who can conceive of a humiliation on that scale? No wonder Ronaldo cried.
If he was Joe Biden then Roberto Martinez was his Jill, clapping and encouraging from the sidelines. You had to wonder. While the stadium crowd filmed Ronaldo, Portugal had a football match to win and they were no closer to getting it done.
How long was Martinez going to stand there and watch this? Unlike the Democratic Party, Portugal have a really strong bench, one of the strongest in this tournament: Jota, Joao Felix, Ramos, Neto, Conçeicao ...
On 65 minutes, Martinez eventually introduced Diogo Jota for ... Vitinha, the skilful central midfielder who had been playing well, but who after all has only 1 million Instagram followers. It meant thinning out Portugal’s midfield, but Martinez must have thought they needed a presence up front. Then Francisco Conceiçao for, as the stadium announcer called it “number seven ... TEEN!” Rafa Leão.
The changes made his team worse. Portugal had been controlling the game easily, with João Cancelo repeatedly roasting Slovenia’s left-back Jure Balkovec down the right. Now that control had evaporated, they were not creating chances, and Slovenia were occasionally threatening on the break.
In the last minute of the first half of extra time, Ronaldo missed the penalty. In the second half, Benjamin Šeško powered away from Pepe, but Diogo Costa advanced and saved brilliantly just as the Slovenian striker seemed poised to send Ronaldo to hell.
A few minutes later, nobody was in any doubt who the true MVP had been, or who this match will be remembered for. Costa who emerged as the man of the match for Portugal. He saved Slovenia’s first penalty, from Josip Iličić, diving to his left. Ronaldo scored Portugal’s first, to a roar of redemptive relief from fans (and some press).
Jure Balkovec was next up for Slovenia; Costa dived left this time and saved again. Bruno Fernandes scored Portugal’s second with his usual insouciance. Benjamin Verbič was next up for Slovenia. A hard shot to the left, Costa again guesses right and saves. Bernardo Silva scored to send Diogo Costa’s Portugal to Hamburg for the quarter-final against France.
