Next Thursday at Stade Velodrome in Marseille, Portugal and Poland will fight for the first semifinal ticket of this European Championship. Striker Arkadiusz Milik who has filled the void left by an absent Robert Lewandowski confessed his admiration for Cristiano Ronaldo. But given that he has been trained by another goal-scoring legend at Ajax (Dutch former striker Dennis Bergkamp), he won't get star struck and will do his job perfectly.
During a press conference ahead of the game, the 22-year old said: "I am not hiding it, it was only a few years ago that I was trying to learn from Cristiano Ronaldo. He's one of the world's best players and players like that you need to follow and take inspiration from. He's an example of hard work, it is not just talent, he's a great example of that. It will be something special for me to play against him. I am very happy, it's great there is the chance to meet on the pitch, but I will try to focus on my team and not look up at him."
He added: "When I joined the club, we had a good relationship because I wanted to spend time after training working on my technique. We have good contact between him and I. We text each other and I send him my greetings from here. Dennis Bergkamp is a special person for me, he's a player who had a great career and you can constantly learn from him. I try to take as much as possible from him."
On Portugal, he added: "We are capable of beating Portugal. We know they're a great team with great players but we know we'll play at 100%. We'll approach it fully focused and if we do that we have a chance of progressing.We're trying to approach it like any other game, we don't feel any additional pressure because we are fighting for the semi-finals. Every single match we try to do our best and that's the same on Thursday."
Photo credit: Portugal National Team