Santos: Playing pretty doesn't win tournaments

Fernando Santos admits Portugal need to improve in the final third if they are to progress even further at Euro 2016, but was nonetheless pleased with the victory over Croatia.

The match saw a new record being set in the European Championships, with not a single shot on target for either team during the initial 90 minutes.

It wasn't till the closing stages of the second-half of extra time that Portugal hit Croatia on the counter-attack after Ivan Perisic had hit the bar, with Ricardo Quaresma heading home after Croatia goalkeeper Danijel Subasic denied Cristiano Ronaldo from close-range.

And although Santos admitted he would have liked to have seen a better performance in the final third, he acknowledged that sometimes 'ugly' football is necessary to find the win.

"It was a very tactical match, we tried to take over but Croatia didn't let us. But we didn't let them, either. You must look at both sides of the coin," he said in his post-match media conference.

"We faced an amazing team, they've played some of the best football in the group stages. They always try to play their type of football.

"We were prepared for that, I got the team ready to fight against that and take advantage of their weak spots. We didn't let them counter-attack much, we paid special attention to that.

"We sometimes played well in attack but I believe we have to improve. In the first half, we had a plan to make the most of the times that the full-backs got forward.

"Sometimes I think we should have passed the ball faster, that didn't work out as we wanted, but we should congratulate Croatia, they didn't let us play as we wanted.

"This was a final, and we won. Today we were the lucky ones. But I think it was fair. We have a very hard match against Poland and we must prepare for that now. We'd like to play a pretty game but that's not always how you win tournaments."