Here’s a question without an answer: what is the greatest
tournament-winning goal ever scored? Despite a lack of superlative silverware
clinchers, any debate on the subject remains pointless without considering
context. A shock winner (such as the recently departed Alcides Ghiggia
silencing the Maracanã in 1950) or a moment of controversy (Geoff Hurst, 1966)
will linger longer in the memory than an aesthetic wonder. Sometimes, a
tournament’s final, decisive moment assumes this extra significance because it
perfectly frames what has gone before.
The 1990 World Cup final, where the canny West Germany
overcame an agricultural Argentina, could and should not have been won by
anything other than a penalty. The same could be said for Andrés Iniesta’s late
winner in Johannesburg in 2010 as Spain – forced to repeatedly pick locks
against cunning defences – did so one final, thrilling time. This rule applies,
perhaps more than with any other winner, to Euro 2004. History has not been
kind to a terrific tournament that was ultimately settled by a scruffy
near-post header from a journeyman player – a moment that adds weight to the
champions’ reputation as the ultimate spoilers. Then again, to loosely
paraphrase Plato, beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
Angelos Charisteas was a player who was never likely to win
any beauty contests. A 6ft 3in centre forward, he played in seven different
leagues after breaking through at Aris Thessaloniki, never reaching double
figures in a league season as he journeyed from Ajax to Arles-Avignon, from Schalke
to Saudi Arabia, in search of a regular starting spot. Yet for one corner of
the Mediterranean, his ordinary goal is a thing of true beauty and events on
and off the pitch since have only increased its mythical status.
Fifty seven minutes into the final at Lisbon’s rebuilt
Estádio da Luz, the shock finalists Greece won a corner, and what seemed to be
a reprieve from deep defending against the hot favourites Portugal. Angelos
Basinas delivered an out-swinging corner into the fabled corridor of
uncertainty, and Charisteas made the connection, nodding the ball down beyond
Ricardo and into the net. The mind’s eye has been kind to Charisteas’s moment
of glory, adding a power and panache that is absent from video replays. Charisteas
does not make a remarkable run, nor does he plant the ball incisively into the
corner as he did in the quarter-final against France. The contact he makes,
inching his head forward a fraction ahead of Costinha, sends the ball beyond
the stranded Ricardo at a curious angle, while Costinha and Ricardo Carvalho,
wedged helplessly either side of the forward, appeal for a free-kick that will
never come.
The goal has come to represent a Greek campaign that was
derided by many as ugly, defensive and uncompetitive, with the Guardian’s own
Barry Glendenning labelling Greece “the only underdogs in history that everyone
wants to see get beaten”. Otto Rehhagel’s team were seen as the undeserving
beneficiaries of a breathless, beautiful tournament in which Italy, Spain and
Germany crumbled in the group stages, Czech Republic left empty-handed after
playing some of the finest football seen this century, and France’s own golden
generation fell short of retaining their title. Great tournament, shame about
the winners – but that is to overlook the fact that two of the heavyweights
mentioned above fell to Greece. An ancient nation, recast as unpopular
outsiders, taking on the modern-day rulers of Europe – suffice to say that for
Greece, it wasn’t the last time.
The road that led to Charisteas’s leap was long, mixing
fortune, flair and fortitude as it wound far beyond their three 1-0 knockout
victories, all earned with a routine header from a right-wing cross. It
arguably began three years earlier at Wembley where, in Rehhagel’s first game
in charge, only a signature moment from David Beckham denied them an away win
on a day when England, in truth, were outclassed. Fired with new belief, a team
without a single win in a major tournament rebounded from two early qualifying
defeats to win their final six group games, beating Spain in Zaragoza (yes, by
a goal to nil) as they sealed a place in Portugal.
In spite of this, Greece arrived as rank outsiders, with
only little Latvia less favoured by seeding or by the odds-makers. As the
forgotten guests at Portugal’s opening party, the Greek team watched an opening
ceremony framed around a giant medieval ship before they faced the hosts in
Porto. On Greek TV, an optimistic commentator told the nation “it’s time for us
to become pirates and steal the victory”. Steal it they did, racing into a 2-0
lead, playing expansive, incisive counter-attacking football, before Cristiano
Ronaldo scored a late consolation. After drawing 1-1 with Spain, with
Charisteas getting his first goal of the tournament, defeat to Russia proved
irrelevant as Portugal’s victory over Spain, who haven’t lost a European
Championship match since, sent Greece into the quarter-finals.
What happened next, depending on who you ask, was either the
finest tactical performance of the century so far, or a trophy robbery that is
best forgotten. While it may not have made for a dizzying spectacle, Rehhagel
adjusted the team’s shape smartly for each match, playing in a lopsided fashion
that destroyed France’s fluidity, keeping a spare man in defence to fight the
rapid movement of the Czechs, and then changing shape to nullify Portugal’s
wingers – Luís Figo and Ronaldo, no less – in the final. Harking back to that
apparently throwaway line from the opening ceremony, Otto’s motley crew earned
a nickname that persists to this day; Piratiko – the pirate ship.
The truth is, of course, that setting up to neutralise the
opposition is nothing new, even if England routinely made a hash of it in
Portugal. Plenty of tournament outsiders – not least Greece themselves – have
employed this tactic in recent years without so much as a sniff of silverware.
After all, if the Greek victory was so easy, so uninspiring, why has it not
happened since? Greece did not require penalties, or even a full period of
extra time, to progress – the centre-back Traianos Dellas’s silver goal against
the Czechs in the semi-final was as close as they came to cutting it fine.
Rehhagel knew that in order for this approach to deliver the ultimate goal, the
sucker punch was crucial. Charisteas was central to this approach and so he was
used as a spare centre-forward who focused on taking the one chance that could
come his way as his team-mates harried and pressed around the pitch.
Angelos Charisteas’s
headed winner for Greece in the Euro 2004 final against the host nation,
Portugal.
Charisteas’s international career overlaps with Rehhagel’s
reign almost exactly, and the striker saved his best work for his national
coach. Just as the goal itself was symbolic of Greece’s incredible,
against-all-odds victory, so the scorer was one of the dustiest jewels polished
up by the German. Rehhagel wrung every drop of ability from a group of domestic
sloggers and European bit-part players. Three Greeks made the team of the
tournament, with Theodoros Zagorakis, once of Leicester City, named the best
player ahead of a who’s who of millennial superstars. The details of how and
why Greece took the trophy ahead of an assortment of golden generations was of
little concern to the players as the final whistle went in Lisbon. The
widespread incredulity was not confined to the watching world – as Basinas has
succinctly put it since, “we couldn’t believe it”.
Euro 2004 took place at a crossroads for Greece, and Europe
as a whole. The team’s victory inspired Athens’s Olympic planners, who urged
workshy stadium builders to follow the football team’s example and show the
world what Greece could do. The tournament began just over a month after an
unprecedented EU expansion, with 10 new nations joining the union. Greece’s
stunning trophy grab came amidst an era of optimism for the nation and the
continent it belonged to. The boom extended to football, with Olympiakos
signing Rivaldo and Yaya Touré, with the financial crisis no more than a
speculative ripple in the pages of Europe’s more economically conscious
publications.
From 2010 to today, Greece’s economic crisis has grown
exponentially and the effects have been felt in sport as keenly as in all other
walks of life. Athens’ Olympic venues lie in ruins, while Olympiakos are
embroiled in a match-fixing scandal and rivals Panathinaikos have not had to
update their list of record transfer fees for half a dozen years. For the third
traditional heavyweight, AEK Athens, things have been even grimmer. A financial
meltdown that was in its infancy in 2004, when player of the tournament
Zagorakis grudgingly departed for Bologna, has forced the 11-times national
champions to rebuild in Greece’s underfunded amateur leagues.
Greeks Salute The Return Of Their Victorious Football Team,
led by their captain Theodoros Zagorakis as he raises the trophy during a
victory fiesta at the Panathenaic Stadium in Athens, as thousands of Greeks
welcomed the new UEFA Euro 2004 Champions. Facebook Twitter Pinterest
Theodoros Zagorakis
raises the trophy during a victory parade at the Panathenaic Stadium in Athens.
Photograph: Milos Bicanski/Getty Images
Club budgets have shrunk by 90% in a decade, as traditional
industries like shipping, which once poured cash into the country’s biggest
clubs, have dwindled in the gloom of austerity. Fan violence and corruption
have spread like a virus, with Golden Dawn, a far-right party with links to
football hooliganism, gaining political traction while facing trial for a
laundry list of deeply unpleasant crimes. The prime minister, Alexis Tsipras,
has tried and failed to suspend a domestic league that has fallen to economic
instability, while the national team, funded by sponsors and still
over-achieving at major tournaments, have become an even brighter beacon. As
the Greek film-maker Nikos Kavoukidis put it, “what do we have left? Television
and football.”
Robbed of the prudent stability offered for over a decade by
Rehhagel and his successor, Fernando Santos, Greece’s fall from grace has been
spectacular. The team lie bottom of their Euro 2016 qualifying group with two
points from an available 18, including an unthinkable double defeat to the
lowly Faroe Islands that has done for two managers – Claudio Ranieri and
Uruguay’s Sergio Markarián. The Piratiko have also been plundered by Romania
and Northern Ireland as their qualification prospects have collapsed. Having
maintained a place at the top table in the world rankings for years, Greece
have fallen outside the top 40.
Far from offering the respite from domestic woes that fans
had hoped, the Greek football team are enduring a continental humiliation that
painfully reflects reality, while soured relations with the European family
have led Rehhagel to sheepishly return to the spotlight as a cuddly cultural
ambassador for Germany. The search for a healthy source of national pride that
has followed such straitened times has given Greece’s finest footballing hour
an aura that borders on the mythical. The most important unremarkable goal in
recent history is also the defining act of a story that extends in all
directions from a field in Lisbon – a rough-edged, routine header that will
ring through the ages.
As the man himself has said, Charisteas’s one moment in time
stands in exalted isolation for the player, for the nation, and for
international football. “Even in 50 years’ time, everybody will remember that I
scored the goal which made Greece the champions of Europe. We wrote history.”
Now that’s something we can all agree on.
Originally published The Guardian
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