Portugal’s troubles in the World Cup qualifiers have shown that they will need a lot more than an on-song Cristiano Ronaldo to mount a serious challenge in Brazil.
Although they can beat any team on their day, Portugal are prone to unexplained lapses and can be chronically wasteful in attack.
Portugal reached Brazil in style with Ronaldo netting all  their goals over the two legs of a memorable 4-2 aggregate playoff win over Sweden.
But that performance masked a difficult qualification campaign in which they were held to unexpected draws by Northern Ireland and Israel and forced into the drama of a two-leg playoff after losing Group F’s top spot to Russia.
It could have been even worse had Ronaldo not dug them out of a hole in the match away to Northern Ireland, scoring a second-half hat-trick in a 4-2 win after they had trailed 2-1 and been reduced to 10 men.
“We certainly had an inconsistent campaign. If that wasn’t the case, we wouldn’t have had to contest a playoff,” said coach Paulo Bento.
“Even though we lost one of the games against Russia, we put in two good performances, but there were three other matches in which we didn’t play so well.”

USA confident of good showing

The days are long gone when it was a surprise for the United States to reach the World Cup finals, but for a country used to sporting success they are still some way short of making a major impact on the tournament.
It remains one of the final sporting frontiers for the United States to conquer although they reached the semi-finals in 1930 and caused one of soccer’s greatest upsets when they beat England the last time that the World Cup was held in Brazil in 1950.

Ghana seek to redress wrongs from 2010


Coming within a kick of creating history at the last World Cup will be the spur for Ghana as they seek to break new ground in Brazil this year.
The Black Stars squandered a last minute penalty in extra time of their quarter-final tie against Uruguay in Johannesburg four years ago to miss becoming the first African side to reach the final four at a World Cup tournament and have been haunted by the failure ever since.
It will provide the motivation for a country who have been handed a tough draw but are confident of progressing past at least two of Germany, Portugal and the USA.