In the land of Cristiano Ronaldo, the oval ball has never made the front pages. Saturday’s match between Portugal and Ireland at the Estádio Nacional do Jamor, west of Lisbon, was no exception to the rule. And that despite its historic nature, with the heaviest defeat in the history of the Portuguese national side (106-7). Digging a little behind the sacrosanct football, we did find articles on the subject in the Portuguese sports press. The tone, clear-eyed without descending into diatribe, tells of a black day for the Lobos.

“The consolation try could not wipe away the pain of the final result” is how it reads in the pages of A Bola, which points out that Ireland “were already 54 points up” at half-time (54-0), “which pointed to a tragic ending for the Portuguese team.” An ending that has written itself into the history of Portuguese rugby with a final margin of a stratospheric 99 points, four more than Portugal’s heaviest defeat until then, which dated back to the 2007 World Cup against New Zealand (108-13). The only opponent, too, to have gone past the 100-point mark against Portugal until now. Since Saturday, there are two.

A step backwards for Portuguese rugby

Ireland were nonetheless without their best players, currently on tour with the British and Irish Lions, as O Jogo is quick to recall. “That did not stop the match from being practically one-way traffic from the first kick, when Stuart McCloskey crossed the try line for the first time for the Irish, only 46 seconds into the game”. A catastrophic start that set the tone for these Lobos, “crushed by 16 Irish tries and who ended up battling, without success, to stop the visitors’ score reaching three figures.”

By way of mitigating circumstances, O Jogo points to the absence of key men Rodrigo Marta, Raffaele Storti, José Lima, Samuel Marques, Cody Thomas and Anthony Alves, who carried Portugal at the 2023 World Cup, allowing the minnows to hold Georgia (18-18) and pull off the feat of beating Fiji (24-23).

“Ireland completely dismantled the Portuguese national team which, despite having had the chance to face several ‘Tier 1’ sides since the 2023 World Cup (South Africa, Scotland and Ireland), showed this time that it was not ready for the scale of the challenge.” A real step backwards for a country that still aspires to grow in the shadow of the game’s best nations.