Cristiano Ronaldo shot and he shot until he could shoot no more, but try as he might that ball would not open the door. As a result, Portugal were held to a 1-1 draw by Iceland in their Group F match of Euro 2016, and instead of admitting that the Portuguese had only themselves to blame for throwing away a host of chances, Ronaldo decided to criticise the Iceland team, saying they had a "small mentality."
While Portugal might have deserved to walk away with more than one point at the end of the final whistle in Saint-Etienne, it is difficult not to admire Iceland's fight and grit, and their ability to punch above their weight, considering this is a country with a total population of 323,000.
Ronaldo, who used the ball in the second half like his own shooting machine, though, was not in "kudos Iceland" mood. "Iceland didn't try anything," Ronaldo was quoted as saying by The Guardian. "They were just defend, defend, defend and playing on the counterattack.
"It was a lucky night for them. We should have three points, but we are OK.
"When they don't try to play and just defend, defend, defend, this in my opinion shows a small mentality and they are not going to do anything in the competition."
Iceland, understandably, considering this was their first ever match in the finals of a major tournament, were ecstatic after the hard-fought draw, earned by a 50th minute goal from Birkir Bjarnason, but Ronaldo did not quite see it that way.
"I thought they'd won the Euros the way they celebrated at the end," Ronaldo added. "It was unbelievable."
However, a point gained against a strong European country like Portugal will already be seen as doing something by Iceland, and with Hungary and Austria to come, you never know, Iceland might just be able to gain enough points to move into the knockout stages of Euro 2016.
"It's a great point," Gylfi Sigurdsson, who had a great couple of chances early on to give Iceland a shock lead, told UEFA's official website. "It was an extremely difficult game, we were defending for perhaps 88 minutes, and as you can perhaps hear I'm losing my voice, since we had to talk a lot and run a lot off the ball.
"But, we've shown before we're more than good enough to defend for 90 minutes against these teams. It shows the character in the team to go 1-0 down against a team like Portugal and still stay in the game."
That 1-0 lead was given by Nani, who had a decent game, but will feel he and the rest of the Portugal side should have put away one more of those chances to pick up a victory from the match. "We controlled the match and showed that we were the better team all along," Nani said. "All they did was play long balls.
"They were very strong, but we controlled the match. We were unlucky, because we had a lot of chances. But this was only the first match. We hope that this is a warning, and that we will start winning matches from now on."
