Euro 2024, Day Five
Euro 2024, Day Five
Turkey excite, Portugal win it late
Ok, only two games today (well, yesterday for pretty much everyone reading this). It was terrible news for most football fans, but it meant I actually left the house for a couple of hours, which was nice. Let’s get into it!
Turkey 3-1 Georgia
Khvicha Kvaratskhelia is the biggest celebrity on the planet. Everywhere he goes, he’s swarmed with people blocking his path.
He pulls so many players towards him. Whenever he has the ball, be it for Georgia or Napoli, entire defences are trying to close him down. This is the “gravity” concept borrowed from basketball (I think, I don’t know anything about basketball). That’s supposed to be a good thing. It draws defenders over to that side of the pitch, creating more space for others. “In all team sports”, said Pep Guardiola in the quote from Pep Confidential I’ve brought up a million times, “the secret is to overload one side of the pitch so that the opponent must tilt its own defence to cope. You overload on one side and draw them in so that they leave the other side weak. And when we’ve done all that, we attack and score from the other side.”
Kvaratskhelia is the perfect player for this. He should have opened up some huge gaps. But Georgia didn’t made it count. Turkey defended Kvaratskhelia really well, but at the same time, they were not giving up large gaps on the other side of the pitch. It was superb.
Turkey got ahead through a Mert Müldür thunderbastard, though I had been really impressed by how they started the game. They had Georgia pinned in their own third. Georgia did get back in it through the right flank, with Kvaratskhelia nowhere near the action, but it was a case of too many Turkish defenders standing still instead of committing. I always felt Georgia were always the inferior side, though, and Turkey pushed pretty hard in the second half to get that win.
Is Arda Güler going to be that guy? He’s very, very young, and while his goalscoring stats at Real Madrid are way above his xG, he’s still doing good things for a teenager. He’s going to get hyped to high heavens now, and I’m not sure that really benefits anyone, but I’m a spoilsport about these things. But he’s obviously very talented, and I’m sure his progress will be documented in great detail. Just accept that he is still a teenager, and he will have ups and downs. Don’t hype him to death then get on his back when he has a slight dip in form.
Turkey look like a football team. Portugal should test them better on Saturday, but this looked promising. This was just a really good game, you know?
Portugal 2-1 Czech Republic
What a smash and grab! I mean, Portugal had lots of chances and played the better football for the entire 90 minutes, but it felt like a smash and grab, you know?