Latvia arrive in Portugal as outsiders so rank you can smell them from here. If the odds against them are to be believed they are not so much minnows as krill. They should not be daunted, however. History shows that the European Championship is a tournament in which every banana skin has a chance to realise its full potential.
In one small corner of the continent, 1964 will be remembered as football’s Golden Age. For this was the year that Luxembourg reached the last eight, dispatching Holland 2-1 in Rotterdam along the way; that this was the Grand Duchy’s last away win against European opposition for 31 years will give some indication of the magnitude of the result. In the quarterfinal Luxembourg took on Denmark.
A 3-3 draw in the Stadium Jose Barthel was followed by a tantalising 2-2 in Copenhagen. The Danes won a play-off in Amsterdam 1-0.
Luxembourg never really recovered from the disappointment and four years later finished bottom of their group, conceding 18 goals and scoring one. The Danes, meanwhile, had travelled to the final stages in Franco’s Spain, where they were soundly spanked in both matches —fitting punishment for shattering a nation’s dreams.
‘There are no giants out there waiting for us,†the England captain Kevin Keegan said before his side set off for Italy in 1980. True enough but plucky little Belgium were quite big enough to see off Ron Greenwood’s men, securing a draw in Turin amid clouds of tear gas.
The Red Devils’ side contained Franky van der Elst, Jan Ceulemans, Eric Gerets (whose middle name is Maria, incidentally) and a goalkeeper, Jean-Marie Pfaff, who these days stars in Belgium’s equivalent of The Osbournes. A supporting cast of decent pros all with names you would not want to try to pronounce if you were sucking a gobstopper ensured the Belgians made it all the way to the final, where they lost to Germany.
According to English commentators, the Republic of Ireland were ‘just happy to be at Euro 88†and would ‘have a party no matter what the resultâ€. Nobody seemed to have told Jack Charlton’s players this, however, and they beat England 1-0, the scorer Ray Houghton celebrating his goal with a forward roll so inept that any self-respecting games teacher would have made him run round the field four times with no shirt on as a punishment.
Not that I’m bitter or anything. The Republic were knocked out courtesy of a fluky, late Dutch goal which saw the ball bite and spin off the turf like a Shane Warne leg-break.
As well as establishing the right of national self-determination, breaking the chains of neo-colonialism and flooding second-hand bookshops with a wave of obsolete atlases, the fragmentation of so many former Eastern Bloc countries in the 1990s also added substantially to the European Championships’ underdog pack.
In 1992 the break-up of Yugoslavia was good news for Denmark. Their manager Richard Moller Nielsen had planned to spend the summer redecorating the kitchen. Instead he got to hand the steam-stripper to his wife and rush off to Sweden. Denmark wriggled through to the final where they beat Germany thanks to a screaming goal from the midfielder John Jensen, though the total weirdness of this last sentence would become apparent only when the moustachioed midfielder signed for Arsenal.
In Euro 96 the minnow count was high. The Swiss had limited international experience. They added to the effect by leaving behind two of their best players, Alain ‘Susi†Sutter and Adrian Knup, allegedly because the pair had protested about French nuclear testing by unfurling a banner before their country’s qualifier with Sweden that read ‘Stop It Chiracâ€.
The manager who got them through, Roy Hodgson, had also decamped to Internazionale and been replaced by the Portuguese Artur Jorge, a man with a moustache so luxuriant he looked as if he was sniffing a muskrat. The Swiss finished below Scotland in the group stage, rarely a sign of success.
The Czech Republic were also regarded as no-hopers. The country that had won the European Championship 20 years before had recently split in two though, as veteran BBC commentator John Motson helpfuly explained, ‘The Velvet Divorce between the Czechs and the Slovaks doesn’t affect the fact that most of the Czech Republic’s players come from the old Czechoslovakia.â€
Despite carrying the burden of a tournament song Uzhuru do Anglie (‘So We Are Thereâ€) that celebrated the qualifying campaign with such memorable lyrics as ‘Water is babbling, wind is murmuring and calmly we beat the Norwegiansâ€, the Czechs made it to the final where they lost to the Germans (yes, them again).
Euro 2000 offered a warm welcome to Slovenia, whose fans wandered around the Low Countries wearing T-shirts bearing the slogan ‘Slovenia — Taste The Differenceâ€, an invitation that, while charming, is perhaps best not paraded in the streets of Amsterdam after dark.
Slovenia’s team was built around Zlatko Zahovic, a playmaker whose ego was slightly bigger than the country itself. In the opening game he inspired his side to take a 3-0 lead over their former masters Yugoslavia.
Unfortunately the Yugoslavs’ malevolent captain Sinisa Mihailovic was then sent off. Liberated from his evil-tempered presence, his teammates fought back to gain a draw and Slovenia went out in the group stage.
And now we have the Latvians. They are in the same group as Holland. No doubt they will have their own means of motivating themselves for that game but surely the slogan ‘If Luxembourg can do it, so can we†should be among them? —