BEWARE OF GREEKS BEARING GIFTS…

GREECE:

Greece are rated 8^th in the world by FIFA.

After the wonderful performance and victory in 2004, Greece will not be able to play on the surprise factor. But they remain a very well organized team which will be very difficult to beat. Apart from its failure to qualify for the World Cup 2006, Greece have kept being impressive in other games. During the qualifying phase, they finished top of their group ahead of Turkey and they got the highest number of points among all the European teams with 31 with 10 victories out of 12.

The main quality and its competitive edge are organization and the rigor. They are not always obviously full of flair but Greek players are dramatically efficient, experienced and organized which has often discouraged and exhausted other teams.

They have experience in players such as Olympiakos Le Pirée’s goalkeeper Antonis Nikopolidis or Atletico Madrid’s Yourkas Seitaridis, former Bordeaux’s

Mihalis Kapsis and former Roma’s Traianos Dellas who were the three best back of the competition in 2004. In midfield, there are still Real Majorque’s Angelos Basinas, former Inter Milan’s Georgios Karagounis and Bolton’s Stelios Giannakopoulos but they will miss former captain Theodoros Zagorakis. With Angelos Charisteas who scored the winning goal in the 2004 final, the team will be almost the same except they have a new weapon in Bayer Leverkusen’s Theofanis Gekas who was a top goalscorer in the Bundesliga.

Plus of course, as a coach there is the inevitable Otto Rehhagel who has trained Greece since 2001 and whose name has passed into soccer folklore as doing an Otto before Jose Mourinho adopted the idea and started talking about parking buses across the pitch.

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