A Parisian Night (nd current)

Again against France. Oh, those were still days, they rave in Porto and Lisbon and everywhere else in Iberia where Spanish is not spoken. It was almost five years ago that the small football country Portugal celebrated the greatest success in its history. 1-0 in the European Championship final in Paris against hosts France, cheered at home by ten million Portuguese and another 1.3 million in exile in France. The economic crisis at home finally spread the Portuguese across Europe.

On the night of Paris, the nation celebrated as excessively as it last celebrated its liberation from the dictator Salazar, and that was almost half a century ago. A noisy motorcade rolled for hours from the Stade de France on the northern outskirts to the Champs Élysees in the center, everyone honked and shouted “Portugal olé!”, Green and red flags fluttered from the windows.

In the summer of 2021, things don’t look that good. Already the 3-0 at the start against Hungary made the Senhores Ronaldo and Co. only convincing in terms of the result. In the second game on Saturday in Munich against Germany, the opponent’s superiority was so oppressive that “A Bola”, something like the Portuguese “kicker”, formulated the not-so-modern comparison that German tanks had probably rolled across the lawn.

So now it’s nice that dear friends from France are waiting for the preliminary round on Wednesday in Budapest. So that the Portuguese can reminisce. To the night of Paris, to the national hero Cristiano Ronaldo, who showed at the decisive moment that he is more than an arrogant snob with a certain skill for handling the ball: the Frenchman Dimitri Payet took him out of the game quite unmotivated early on kicked, but Ronaldo doesn’t give a damn about his damaged ankle. In the short break before the extension, he hobbled back from his treatment table to the sidelines, where he worked his way off as humorlessly as is commonly said of those German tanks that the colleague from “A Bola” saw rolling through Munich on Wednesday.

In the half-time break of extra time, he had a short conversation with the recently substituted striker Éder, whose real name is Éderzito António Macedo Lopes, but hardly anyone in Portugal knows that. Ronaldo instructs his colleague to please score the winning goal now. Because the word of the world star is law in the Seleção, Éder obeys and shoots Portugal to win the European Championship.

Portugal will love him for this goal for a lifetime, even if afterwards there wasn’t much to hear from Éderzito António Macedo Lopes. He is now 33 years old, three years younger than Cristiano Ronaldo, who is still leading Portugal and does not intend to change anything, just as he does not want to know anything about a possible failure of the European champions in Budapest. It could be that the opponent is the best team in the world, Ronaldo thinks in other categories. He has played six times against France and has not yet scored a single goal. Wednesday would not be a bad time for a late premiere.