Greece Win Euro 2004 Final, Again

March 27th, 2008 | by: Daryl |

European champions Greece beat Portugal again, in their first meeting since the Euro 2004 final. In fairness to Portugal they were missing Ronaldo, Nani and Deco. Highlights include Angelos Charisteas’ excellent high high lob over Ricardo – which landed on top of the bar, but it’s still worth a look – and of course Giorgos Karagounis’ unbelievable 33rd minute free kick, which was made a lot more believable when he repeated it almost exactly in the 60th.

I remember Greece’s strength at Euro 2004 being set pieces, but it was more the brute force cross-it-in-and-score-with-a-header type of set piece than these two slices of gold.

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Comments

By Pedro | March 27th, 2008 at 12:46 pm

Plus Simao had to leave early, Quaresma was not only uninspired and had a super strong man-marking, making it very difficult for him.
Without CR and Nani, PT’s strongest aspect, the wings, was killed. Which was, at the end, good, in order to be forced to improvise…
Anyway, this match was rather to check other midfiled options and it turned out that it actually improved with 2 strikers, something usually unseen with PT.
The 60 million duo Pepe – Ricardo Carvalho dind’t really tick as good as with Bruno Alves, playing better and better with FC porto.
We also missed Bosingwa, currently our best righ-full back. It’s like having both a defender and an extra winger…
All in all, GRE played better than PT, except in most of the 2nd half; where even with a new system, or no system, PT almost drew. But PT was way below par.
GRE’s freekicks were, indeed, excellent. They still miss the guy at SL Benfica…

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