The senior national team of Macedonia, for the first time in a while, will play a friendly against a top 5 side from the FIFA rankings list tomorrow when they take on Portugal in the city of Leiria.

Motivation should not be an issue for the Macedonian side as manager John Toshack already mentioned earlier in the week that the players are eagerly awaiting the friendly against Cristiano Ronaldo and Portugal.  Macedonia has the reputation of playing up and down to the level of its competition.  To illustrate that point, Macedonia has drawn against such sides as England and Netherlands not too long ago, but then suffered losses to Luxembourg and Andorra.  Even under the current manager John Toshack, the best game under his reign was the 0:1 loss away to to Russia when Macedonia outplayed the Russian side for the majority of the game, while the worst performance came in the 1:4 defeat against Armenia on the road.

For the friendly against Portugal, Toshack is expected to field a defensive minded formation with five defenders.  Macedonia has been struggling to score goals, and Toshack stated in the recent past that if we can’t score goals, we might as well make it harder for our opponents for score goals as well.

Macedonia will try to display a good performance against Portugal to make amends for the 2:1 loss to Luxembourg in the previous friendly on 29 February.  After that match, both Toshack and captain Goran Pandev spoke about being embarrassed from that defeat, and the need to demonstrate 100% effort in the future when representing the national team.  The friendly against Portugal will serve as a good test to see how the players respond from the Luxembourg defeat.

21 players made the trip to Portugal, with the squad missing some important contributors such as Goran Popov and the players who feature in Asia who were not allowed to join the team due to club obligations.  Toshack is likely to start with Edin Nuredinoski in goal, Daniel Georgievski, Vanche Shikov, Boban Grncharov, Nikolche Noveski and Vladimir Dimitrovski or Yani Urdinov in defense from right to left, Muhamed Demiri and Nikola Gligorov as the two defensive midfielders, and Goran Pandev, Ivan Trichkovski and Filip Ivanovski or Ferhan Hasani in attack.

The two questions marks are the left wingback position and one of the attackers.  With the absence of Goran Popov, Toshack is expected to decide between Dimitrovski or Urdinov for the left wingback position.  Since Dimitrovski is more of a defensive minded player, he is likely to get the nod over Urdinov against a potent Portugal attack.  Meanwhile, John Toshack is not much of a fan of the Macedonian league, criticizing its quality, so the lone domestic based player in Filip Ivanovski of Vardar could be replaced in the starting lineup by Ferhan Hasani.

The friendly against Portugal gets underway tomorrow at 18:00 CET at the Dr. Magalhães Pessoa stadium.  The referee of the match will be Alan Kelly from Ireland, his two assistants will be Marc Douglas and Allen Lynch, while the fourth referee will be Carlos Miguel Taborda Xistra from Portugal.

To date, Macedonia and Portugal have met just once and that occurred back in 2003 when Portugal celebrated a 1:0 win thanks to a goal by legendary player Luís Figo.  That game was played on a neutral venue in the city of Lausanne, Switzerland.