Euro 24, Group F; Georgia on their minds?
Portugal should be among the favourites to win this competition, while Georgia are the rank outsiders.
And still they rumble on. Portugal’s big three. A combined age of 116, and with 452 appearances between them. Rui Patricio, Pepe and Cristiano Ronaldo, two of whom are highly likely to be in their starting eleven and one of whom still has a chance. This raises many questions. What are they putting in Portuguese water? Is this the benefit of a Mediterranean diet? Or… does their ongoing presence in the squad raise questions over the Portugal squad’s strength in depth, and might there even be a chance that they might prove to be weak links in a highly talented team?
In goal, Rui Patricio is in the squad, but having lost his first team place at Roma towards the end of last season (and now having been given a free transfer, though Manchester City reportedly being interested in having him as a back-up feels like quite thick silver lining) and seems likely to start on the bench, with Porto’s Diogo Costa chosen instead. But Pepe, the legendary Pepe, now 41 years old, is likely to start, as is Cristiano Ronaldo, who may find the pace in this tournament to be a little higher than that of the Saudi Pro League.
Portugal do have some really great players. Ruben Diaz. Bruno Fernandes. Diogo Jota. Matheus Nunes. Bernardo Silva. Goncalo Ramos. Joao Felix. Ruben Neves. Joao Cancelo. Diogo Dalot. Raphael Leao. If anything, that’s too many. And they’ll be starting as clear favourites to win this group. They were the only team to come through their qualifying group with a 100% record, though this should be tempered by the weakness of their group otherwise.
There may be questions to ask over whether Roberto Martinez, The Man Who Broke Belgium, is the right man to be overseeing another country’s Golden Generation, but there’s such a wealth of talent going on there that’s it feels surprising that more people aren’t talking about them potentially winning the tournament, especially as their group draw in the finals has also been beneficial to them as their qualifying group draw was.
Czechia qualified for the finals in a slightly surprising second place behind Albania, although it should be added that this was only on goal difference, while both finished a comfortable four points clear of third-placed Poland. They have, of course, form in the tournament having reached the final in 1996 before losing to a spilled shot of a golden goal against Germany in the final.
They haven’t come as close again since, though they’d gone further before. The pre-split Czechoslovakia beat both of the World Cup finalists from just two years earlier, the Netherlands after extra-time in the semi-finals and West Germany in the final on penalties thanks to Antonin Panenka’s chipped kick down the middle, to lift the title in 1976.
That sort of thinking runs like a seam through Czechia’s involvement in this tournament. Consider for a moment Karel Poborsky against Portugal in 1996 and Patrik Schick from the halfway line against Scotland at Hampden three years ago. Sporadically expect the unexpected. But how does that sit in comparison with the current squad of players?
Since finishing up their Euros group—with the biggest disruption coming when Jaroslav Silhavy quit as head coach after their final match and had to be replaced at short notice by Marek Hamsik—they’ve played four friendlies and won all of them. They kept Erling Haaland from scoring for 75 minutes before he was retired in a 2-1 win against Norway in Oslo in March, but otherwise Armenia, Malta and North Macedonia haven’t provided the stiffest of opposition, and they needed a 98th minute penalty to get past North Macedonia.
As a middling European nation, Czechia tend to struggle against worse teams while looking better, the better the quality of opposition they come across. If a team defends extremely deeply against them, they may find them difficult to break them down, but at the same time they do have enough talented players—Schick, Tomas Souceck and Matej Jurasek, certainly—to be able to break down better opponents. The front foot, it rather seems, doesn’t really suit them. But off the back of a decent run of results they are in a good position to get through from this group.
If Portugal are the clear favourites to win this group, the battle for second place seems to be between Czechia and Turkey, and Turkey feel like a mass of contradictions. A surface reading of their squad doesn’t show much quality. There’s Kerem Aktürkoğlu of Galatasaray, Cenk Tosun of Besiktas, Hakan Calhanoglu of Inter, for example, but there’s no great strength in depth and it should be remembered that they crashed and burned last time around, losing all three of their group matches, losing to Italy, Wales and Switzerland and scoring their only goal of the tournament 62 minutes into their final match, by which time they were already long-eliminated.
Some of you may have noticed that I’ve used “play-offs” to describe the convoluted Nations League route into these finals. This held pretty well, so far (the last thing anybody needs is for our heads to get full of useless information about qualification for rules for tournaments which are literally just about to start), but with Georgia an explanation is required, because otherwise their place in this tournament wouldn’t make any sense.
Georgia finished fourth in their qualifying group behind Spain, Scotland and Norway, but their performance in Group C of the 2022/23 Nations League, in which they won five matches out of six against Bulgaria, North Macedonia and Gibraltar won them a place in the play-offs for a place in these finals. In the semi-finals of these play-offs they beat Luxembourg 2-0 in front of more than 51,000 people in Tbilisi, and then in the final they held Greece to a goalless draw before beating them 4-2 on penalty kicks to book their place in these finals.
Now don’t get me wrong, Georgia have qualified for these finals by a legitimate means that was set up by those running the tournament, but this doesn’t prevent a degree of concern over what might happen to them in Germany. They’re by a long way the lowest ranked team in this tournament—they’re currently ranked 75th by FIFA; the next lowest-ranked team in Albania, a full nine places above them in 66th—and although they have Khvicha Kvaratskhelia, there’s not a great deal else in their squad to get that excited about.
Anything above three defeats will be an achievement for Georgia. Avoiding bottom place would be a serious achievement and bring with it the possibility of getting through to the second round. Turkey, as we saw in the last iteration of this tournament, can blow very cold indeed, while Czechia have been pushed by lower-ranked opponents before. There are, in other words, reasons to believe that this isn’t a fully lost cause.
But there are also reasons to be less optimistic. Their only wins in 2023 came against Cyprus (twice), Mongolia and Thailand, while they were beaten 7-1 at home by Spain. The previous year brought their Nations League adventure, but also a narrow 2-1 win away to Gibraltar. 2021 is the last year during which we see an impressive win, a 2-0 home win against Sweden in the qualification matches for the last World Cup. Sweden didn’t end up qualifying for that, and they didn’t qualify for these Euros instead. But Georgia did, so can they make anything of a highly unexpected first appearance in the finals of a major tournament?