Portugal seem to believe that playing the long game is the best route to Euro 2016 success.
Now into the semi-finals in France, Fernando Santos’ team have yet to win a match in 90 minutes at the tournament. They have drawn with Iceland, Austria, Hungary, Croatia and now Poland before, in the latter two cases, getting the job done later on.
If that’s the plan, then it’s working. But as they reached a fourth European Championships semi-final in the last five tournaments—a record that they haven’t recieved enough credit for—it was impossible not to think of the future and what this tournament grounding would do for the man of the moment in Marseille.