Turkish football, especially in the last 25 years, has witnessed unforgettable matches with both its clubs and its national team. As TrScouts, we are starting a series in which we will share with you the reviews and tactical analyzes of these unforgettable matches, taking into account the saying "out of sight, out of mind".
If we were to ask you which is the most memorable match in Turkish football history, we are starting this series with the match that would probably get the most answers, the Turkey-Czech Republic match in Euro 2008.
Here is the review of this match, which offers unique sections of the "comebacks" story full of miracles that Turkey started to write with the match against Switzerland in its Euro 2008 adventure.
Before Tournament
Although Turkey beat the champion of the last tournament, Greece, 4-1 in Athens in the Euro 2008 Qualifiers Group C, it got its ticket to the tournament by beating Bosnia and Herzegovina 1-0 in Ali Sami Yen in the last week and could go to the tournament behind Greece.
This tournament was the third European Championship in which Turkey would participate. In '96, where we participated for the first time in our history, we could neither score nor score as a victim of our inexperience. In our second tournament, Euro 2000, where we beat not only Ireland but also the "Irish among us", we first scored against Sweden and then won against the host Belgium. We beat and made it to the quarter finals, where we got stuck in Portugal, but the improvement was very obvious. We skipped Euro 2004 and watched our neighbors win, and started to prepare for Euro 2008.
The rival Czech Republic was coming into the tournament with a bang, finishing ahead of Germany in the qualifiers. They were already a much more experienced team than us in international tournaments, and while they reached the semi-finals in 2004, they were finalists in our first tournament, '96.
The draw for this European Championship, which will be hosted by Switzerland and Austria, was held in Lucerne, Switzerland, on December 2, 2007, and Turkey; The host Switzerland was relegated to the same group with the Czech Republic, the semi-finalist of the last tournament, and Portugal, its regular rival in the Euros.
Before the match
In the first week matches of Group A, our Crescent-Star team played against Portugal and the Czech Republic played against the host Switzerland.
While Turkey bowed to Portugal 2-0 with the goals of Pepe and Raul Meireles in the match whose first half ended in a draw, apart from these two names, there are also players such as Bosingwa, Simao, Fernando Meira, Nani, Bruno Alves, Hugo Almeida and Ricardo Quaresma, whom we will watch playing in our country later. 7 players were in the Portugal squad.
The Czech Republic had a good start to the tournament, beating the hosts Switzerland with a single goal.
In the second week, it was the Czech Republic's turn to face Portugal, the strong team of the group, and this time Portugal was 2 ahead of the Czechs and won the match 3-1.
Our national team, on the other hand, does not feel like the guest team against the host Switzerland, thanks to the intense support of our expatriates, in the match where both teams will definitely say goodbye to the tournament if they lose, but while no one understands what they are playing on the field that turned into a lake under heavy rain, Hakan made a pass from Eren Derdiyok, who passed Volkan. He was sending the close ball into the empty goal, and now our job was left to miracles.
In the second half, the ground dried out a little more and football became playable. Semih, who entered the game at the beginning of the half, put the ball into the goal with a magnificent cross from Nihat and raised hopes again. But the draw did not mean anything, more was needed and that more would come in 90+2 with Arda's individual effort. As the ball he cleared and shot hit the defense and dropped the remaining water droplets in the net, Turkey's story began to be written.
At the end of the second matches, Portugal was guaranteed to leave the group in the table in Group A, and the host Switzerland was the first team to be eliminated from the tournament. Turkey and the Czech Republic, which revived their hopes at the last minute and carried them to the last match, would also compete to get out of the group, and the winner of the match between these two teams would get a ticket to the quarter-finals. It was a complete “winner takes all” match. Since the points and goals scored and conceded by both teams were equal, if the match ended in a draw at the end of 90 minutes, the penalty shootout would immediately begin.
In fact, Turkey saw the first signs of the injury problem that plagued the tournament throughout the tournament in every match, Fatih Terim was probably only able to field his ideal 11 against Portugal. Even though the match against Switzerland was won, which was extremely tiring both physically and mentally, it also exhausted us. We could only use captain Emre Belözoğlu and Gökhan Zan against Portugal, and we sacrificed Tümer after the Switzerland match and we could not benefit from these names. Names such as Hakan Balta, Servet Çetin, Emre Aşık also had problems and their situation would become clear at match time.
Turkey started the match with Mehmet Topal and Semih Şentürk, who entered the game during the halftime of the match against Switzerland and changed the course of the match in our favor. Among the 11 that won the match against Switzerland, only Emre Aşık was on the bench due to his injury, leaving his place to Emre Güngör, who would wear the national jersey for the second time. In the Switzerland match, pairing up the front libero and forward and advancing the game through balls thrown to the wings gave good results, and we were aiming to implement this plan by settling with 4-2-2-2 in this match as well.
The skeleton of the Czech Republic's injury-free squad was clear. A 4-3-3 formation was preferred in both matches, and Milan Baros started in the first 11 instead of Koller in the Portugal match. Although 2.02 tall giant Jan Koller started as a substitute in the Portugal match, he was the team's first choice at centre-forward, and in the tournament where Rosicky was absent due to his injury, the attacks were based on him and the long balls thrown to him. Although it was claimed before the match that the Koller-Baros duo could be used, coach Karel Brückner preferred to preserve the integrity of the midfield.
The match started exactly as expected, the Czechs got a shot opportunity when Koller brought down a ball that was inflated forward and managed to shoot at our goal in the 10th second, while we were getting clues about how our opponent was planning to play. In the following minutes, while Turkey tried to be effective by sending long balls to the centre-forwards Semih and Nihat, who opened to the wings, or to Tuncay on the right wing, the Czech Republic continued its desire to play to Koller, and after these long balls, they were also winning free kicks from dangerous points, which made Koller It was one of the methods they used to get the ball together. The Czechs, who took 4 set pieces in the first 13 minutes, managed to be the first to touch the ball in 3 of them.
They left such a big gap, and this was due to the fact that Kazım was a player who required closer marking compared to Sabri, as well as the fact that a player like Hamit, who would benefit from the space he would create when he moved to the side, moved from right-back to midfield. In other words, Fatih Terim's plan to move into the opponent's area by moving Tuncay to the middle with the Semih-Sabri change at the beginning of the second half and providing an extra man in the midfield was successful, and then he put Kazım on the right wing, and moved Sabri to right-back and Hamit. The mid-swipe move also yielded results. The goal, which heralded the comeback, was the fruit of all these moves.
After the goal, the Czechs increased the security on the right wing, where our effectiveness was at its peak, with the Plasil-Kadlec change, pulled the defense further back, and we started to see even Koller further behind than ever before during the match. In this section, we were making effective crosses in the positions that Arda, who started to show his mobile and free role more clearly in the second half, prepared for Kazım on the right wing, but these crosses were not hitting the target.
In the 87th minute of the match, in an attack from the right wing, Hamit's cross again did not hit the target, but Petr Cech probably did not want to ignore our desire after the goal and let the ball slip away and awarded the goal to Nihat. In the match where we said 20 minutes ago "but the guys also have a very solid defense", now, with 2 minutes left, we say "why not another goal?" we were saying.
The Czechs panicked and even dispersed. So it was really a question of why not? Before Nihat's second goal and our team's third goal, the Czech defense, which did not leave even the slightest gap for 75 minutes, welcomed Hamit in an amateur manner as in the image below, and Hamit, one of the stars of the match, was passing the ball to Nihat, showing how right it was to play in the midfield. The sound of Nihat's shot coming from the post and the ball going in, the subsequent screams of joy and Tuncay's iconic high jump while celebrating were not even one gram less than what the 11 believing men on the field deserved.
Even though the match was over, it wasn't over.
There was more drama to fit into this match. Again, Volkan punched the ball from a long ball, the Czechs could not find the goal and the ball went out under Sabri's control, but Volkan could not control himself again and pushed Koller, who had already thrown himself to the ground, accompanied by Rıdvan Dilmen's "don't do it" shouts, representing 70 million. . The punishment for this was indisputable, a red card. It had already been half an hour since "we had the right to substitute players" and thus Tuncay Şanlı, who in my opinion was the igniter of the match, was wearing Volkan's jersey, praying on the one hand, and warning his friends not to retreat too far on the other. Fortunately, the Czech Republic did not have the opportunity to test Tuncay's goalkeeping skills in the remaining time, and Volkan's impulsive move remained an adrenaline-increasing event rather than causing a disaster.