Jun
15
Turkey take second place in Group A
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Turkey secured a second place finish and a possible match against Croatia in the quarter-finals with a win over the Czech Republic earlier today. The latter will be going home after an unsuccessful tournament with two losses from Turkey and Portugal and one win over Switzerland.
This game will go down as one of the biggest upsets in the 2008 European Championships (until the next one, of course) as Turkey scored 2 goals in the last two minutes of the game to turn a 2-1 decision to a 3-2 decision on their part.
The Czechs controlled most of the game and scored their first goal in the 34th minute with Koller. Taking advantage of his height and power, Koller scored with a header from a Grygera cross to reduce some of the pressure for his team and pave the way for the necessary victory that will lead them to the next round. Plasil made it 2-0 in the 62nd minute of the game as Turkey was starting to press for the equalizer. The latter did manage to get one goal back 12 minutes later. It looked over as Turkey was not creating the chances needed to score another goal and with 2 minutes left in the game, Petr Cech gave the game away for this team. Cech’s terrible mistake in the 88th minute gave Nihat the chance to score the equalizing goal for his team. Just two minutes later, his efforts paid off again as Nihat scored the winning goal for Turkey giving his team a much unexpected and very much last minute win over the Czech Republic.
Turkey will now move on to the next round but they will be missing their starting goalkeeper who received a red card in the last minute of the game. One has to wonder if the Turkish team will be able to continue winning games at the nick of time considering that their other victory in the group against Switzerland was also the result of an injury time goal.
In the other game in Group A, Switzerland scored two second half goals to win their first game in the European Championships. Yakin scored both goals for his team at the 71st and 83rd minutes of the game. Portugal who had already qualified didn’t bother fielding their best lineup as Scolari preferred to both experiment and rest his better players for the next game. If the Swiss had not lost their game to Turkey, they could have been the one going through to the next round. At the end of the day, this was not a bad performance for the co-hosts of the 2008 European Championships.