מרסלו מודה רונאלדו

“Whoever has opportunities and fails to score, either because the opposing goalkeeper was very good, or because he hit the crossbar, or because he failed, and whoever succeeds wins, that's called effectiveness. And in life we have this. And here Portugal played, played, played and played, but it wasn't effective”, he lamented, speaking to journalists after watching the match between Morocco and Portugal (1-0).

“We didn't score. So we had five or six opportunities. Morocco had two, three. He did one and could have done one more. We had five, six. We can do one or two. But I wanted to thank the Portuguese team for taking us to the quarterfinals, people are very ungrateful and when you lose you don't have the same enthusiasm as you had in the last game, I wanted to thank them for what they did”, he said.

“And I would especially like to say a word to Cristiano: nobody knows what the future is, but there will only be another World Cup in four years, with a final phase. It may happen that he, like other players who have been around for a long time, will not have the opportunity to play again in a final phase of the World Cup, I would like to thank him for what he has done in many World Cups and many European competitions and to him and others on the team, what they did for Portugal", he underlined.

"This time it didn't work out, I think Morocco won and deserved to win but we did what we could have done to reach the quarterfinals but we weren't effective", added the President of the Republic.