Martinez inherited team with shattered confidence... but he's the gold standard
There's a party planned at Sporting Lisbon’s 50,000 Jose Alvalade Stadium on Sunday with Portugal facing Iceland and going for a 10 out of 10 win record in European Championship qualification.
The headline act will be Cristiano Ronaldo back at his first club and fresh from scoring in Portugal’s 2-0 win away at Liechtenstein on Thursday. He will be 39 at next summer’s Euros.
But perhaps the bigger story is the incredible record of his current coach Roberto Martinez, who has now gone 38 European and World Cup qualification games with Belgium and Portugal, without losing a single match.
It didn’t look an easy job for Martinez when he replaced Fernando Santos at the start of the year. He was inheriting a team whose morale was shattered by a quarter-final defeat by Morocco at the 2022 World Cup in Qatar.
And there would surely be trouble ahead in the dressing room. Ronaldo’s decline would need to be managed. Joao Felix’s sometimes apparently fragile ego would have to be nurtured. And the talents of Bruno Fernandes, Bernardo Silva and Goncalo Ramos would all need to be accommodated.
On Thursday all five started as already qualified Portugal experimented with a bold system that looked like a 3-3-4 at times with Ruben Neves in the middle of a back three.
The 2-0 win made it nine wins from nine qualifiers this year. Perhaps no one should be surprised. Martinez is becoming the gold standard for ‘foreign’ national coaches.
When he took the Portugal job he made it his first task to go and see each of the 26 players who had been in Qatar under Santos. To a man they all still wanted to continue.
His next job was to make sure when they reported for their first group games he would be able to speak to them in Portuguese. He took classes for
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