I agree, the B team has helped a lot (hopefully we transition them to the main national team soon!).
Iturbe was a big loss for Porto. Missed out on some serious money there, but it seemed like he never fit in at Porto and then was a sudden massive success in Italy. I doubt Porto could have foreseen that Verona would action that 15m clause.
Not so sure Fernando will go to City.. not much is being talked about him in the English media tbf.
Interesting to see Fonseca back at Pacos.. should be interesting to see if he can take them back up the table.
ANYWAY! Moving on to the main topic of this post.. the shambolic first World Cup match..
What a bad start. A thrashing defeat, Pepe suspended for two matches, Coentrao possibly out for two matches as well, Hugo Almeida also went off injured and we didn't even get a consolation goal. It really could not have gone any worse (only if Ronaldo had been injured as well!).
I was surprised to see that we were starting with the Three M's in midfield again considering how they hadn't played together in any of the friendlies leading up to the World Cup. I was really expecting William to start, and what a big miss he was in our midfield. Our lineup was SO SO SO predictable because of that unwillingness to change by Paulo Bento. I bet Joachim Low had the easiest time ever deciding on his tactics against us.
It was just crazy organisation right from the start, even before the red card we were already 2-0 down, so I can't even say we didn't deserve to lose because we totally did. A shame because we are usually so organised defensively, quite shocking to see the way we played today.
The red card really added insult to injury though. We were starting to create chances right before the red card but Pepe completely flushed all that down the toilet with his idiotic actions.
Attacking-wise we were very poor as well and the few times we made good attacks we kept trying to find Ronaldo instead of shooting or trying to find someone else.
I really hope we make some changes for the next match. William has to start instead of Veloso and I'd like to see Meireles dropped for Amorim as well (Adrien would have been very useful right about now). Neto should start next to Bruno Alves and not Ricardo Costa who bizarrely came on today instead of Neto. Neto is so much better its not even funny.
Having watching the USA-Ghana match, I really think we should be beating both of them. Despite USA winning, Ghana looked the better team, but they were poor with their final balls and their defence is also quite shaky. USA were being opened up by Ghana quite often and were lucky that Ghana didn't produce a better final ball and attacking-wise they rely almost entirely on very quick and accurate counter-attacks. Those might pose a problem.
I'll be very disappointed if we don't get at least 4 points from them, but we really should be getting all 6.
Also btw, this link shows an in-depth analysis of our problems with pics, well worth a look:
http://lateral-esquerdo.blogspot.pt/