The Ireland men's Sevens came from behind in both of their European Games fixtures in Krakow yesterday to leave themselves two wins from the Paris Olympics.
James Topping's side are favourites to take the one spot on offer for the Games, with the runners-up and third placed teams making a final repechage in Monaco next summer.
Ireland want to avoid that scenario and will take on Portugal at the Henryk Reyman Stadium at lunchtime today (12.58pm Irish time) for a place in the final against Great Britain or Spain.
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"It's always a little nerve-wracking because there's so much on the line and everybody has to bring their A game," said Jordan Conroy.
"We're still building into day three and there's more to come. We know what we've got to do and we're looking forward to the semi-finals."
After a couple of opening pool game wins on Sunday, Ireland conceded early against Germany in their final Pool A game yesterday but powered through for a 19-7 victory thanks to tries from Jack Kelly, Conroy and Andrew Smith.
That set up an evening quarter-final against Belgium, the second best third place finishers after the pool stage.
Once again Ireland started slowly and conceded the first try, but they responded with four of their own, with Liam McNamara scoring a brace in a 26-12 win.
"It's only one score and it's in the first couple of minutes, it's not really anything to go by because you're in trouble when you're three scores down, you can always come back from one score down," said Conroy.
"We did that and we held our composure, we just stuck to our game plan and got the win.
"Look, we'll do nothing different than we did on day one and today, we'll get a good night's rest and we'll focus from the get-go and again, we'll just play our game and it should do the job, hopefully.
"We can definitely hear the Irish fans and it's great to see, it's nice to have them here because at the last Olympics we didn't.
"So we want to do it for them as much as ourselves. It would be incredible to have them there."
World Sevens player of the year Terry Kennedy added: "It was a tough one, we're pretty relieved. We dug deep to get that win.
"Belgium are a good side, they came second in the Challenger Series to get onto the World Series stage so we knew that they were going to be really tough.
"They've got some big lads, some lads who can move, so it was always going to be a tough battle - so to come through, we're absolutely delighted.
"It's a really tough match against Portugal, we've played them plenty of times before. They're going to challenge us and we're going to have to be at our best to make sure we come through again."
