Euro 2008 Team Previews
Here are the rest of the Euro 2008 Team Previews.
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France remains the greatest talent generator in Europe. The regular rearing of excellent players means there is no chasm between generations. And so, two years after reaching the World Cup final, Raymond Domenech will travel to the Euros with a squad featuring 10 players who have never before been to a major championship – and high hopes of returning with the trophy.
These 11 names will not set neutral hearts racing. But they really have been “the best team in Europe”, as Franz Beckenbauer enthused not long ago, at least in a narrow sense that no other side has managed to look bigger than the sum of their parts in quite the same way.
The absence of a genuine international class centre-forward could be decisive. The broken leg suffered by Arsenal’s Eduardo Da Silva against Birmingham City in February was a source of widespread consternation far beyond North London – fans in Zagreb and Dubrovnik watched their best prospect for goals ruled out in the cruellest fashion.
Poland have qualified impressively for the last two World Cups, only to flop badly having got there and the fear is that, having reached the finals of the European Championship for the first time, the big tournament experience might be about to repeat itself.
Bucking the trend for giddy pre-tournament optimism, the general consensus
both inside and outside Austria is that this could be the worst team ever
put out by the hosts of an international championship. Such pessimism is
based largely on Austria’s current Fifa world ranking of 101, just ahead of
Haiti and the Cape Verde Islands.
The challenge is to get as far into this piece as possible without mentioning his name. It’s not easy: Portugal’s hopes of completing their European Championship odyssey (quarter-final in 1996, semi-final in 2000, final in 2004, winners in 2008) depend on something career-defining from the Portuguese player. If he is not the best player in the world then he is surely the best at these championships.
Turkey are one of the tournament’s most unbalanced teams. That’s not a reference to the last time they took on Switzerland, rather to the fact that they boast a plethora of flair midfielders yet are frequently undone by an inability to perform basic chores up front and, in particular, at the back.
In 1996 they rode intrepidly to the final; in 2000 they were fearfully unlucky to go out at the first stage in the definitive group of death; and in 2004 they were the most entertaining, and arguably the best, side in the tournament before being smothered by the Greek blanket in the semi-finals.
The trouble is that the key men from those recent tournaments are missing: Karel Poborsky and Pavel Nedved have retired from international football since the last World Cup, and the captain, Tomas Rosicky, is out with a hamstring injury
Four years ago the Swiss said this would be the tournament of truth. Unfortunately for them, it looks like the truth is the Nati aren’t as good as they thought they’d be.