If, as seems possible, the improving Russia defeat Spain in the second
semi-final of the 2008 European Championship on Thursday, what price the
success of a competition described last week by Michel Platini, the Uefa
president, as a sizzler?
Of course, publicly, Platini and his allies will continue their bluster and
may even express genuine delight that the tournament has produced an
unexpected finalist, particularly one who, at their best, play such pure and
exhilarating football. Yet privately, one wonders if there will be an
acknowledgement that the second meeting of Russia and Spain in 17 days
amounts to a colossal failure of tournament planning, devaluing the
competition and potentially the worthiness of the winners; and that this
flaw could have been avoided with barely a moment's thought.
It is ridiculous that group opponents should be destined to meet a second time
in the last four, as Spain and Russia will do. The same thing happened at
the World Cup in 2002, when Turkey were forced to play Brazil twice to try
to reach the final, first in group C, losing 2-1, and then in the
semi-finals, losing 1-0.
The first encounter should have precluded the second. Nobody should have to
face Brazil again just to contest the final. Playing a team in an early
round should guarantee no rematch until only two teams remain and it can no
longer be avoided. Anything else is unfair.
The weakness in the declaration of any world or European crown is that the
winners play only a fraction of the teams competing. To reach Euro 2008,
Russia entered a seven-team qualifying group with Croatia, England, Andorra,
Israel, the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia and Estonia and must play
six further matches to win the final (so far against Spain, Greece, Sweden
and Holland). In this campaign, then, Russia have met ten opponents out of a
possible 52 and by reintroducing Spain a round early, Uefa reduces the
possibility that they will be eliminated by another opponent, narrowing the
options yet further.
It is always unsatisfactory when group opponents are drawn together in the
knockout phase of the Champions League, but that competition increasingly
thrives on the establishment of epic club rivalries and enmity that was once
solely the preserve of the domestic leagues. This is different, because to
have teams meeting twice in five games at a tournament - and remember, had
Spain's fixture with Russia been the last group game, not the first, it
would have been twice in three games over the space of eight days - is a
basic design fault and, in this case, an unnecessary one.
There is much to recommend the general European Championship format, which is
why it is a crime that Uefa is considering interfering with it. Restricting
the finalists to 16 nations makes for a compact, high-quality affair in
which there are no weaklings and participants try to hit the ground running.
This is not like the World Cup, in which most strong European teams are as
good as guaranteed one easy afternoon in the group stage and probably only
one thorough test. Here, even Austria, the supposed laughing stocks, took
Croatia and Germany all the way and got a deserved point off Poland.
Uefa is contemplating expanding the finals to include 24 teams, which would be
a calamity. For a start, as there are 53 nations in Uefa, it would mean that
almost half of them progress, diluting the standard greatly, and, once
there, that 16 of the 24 make the knockout stages, making it harder to be
eliminated than to go through. One win in three could do it. Mediocrity
would be rewarded and a tournament that has a reputation, much like golf’s
US Open, of being the stiffest test even if rival tournaments carry greater
prestige, would ape the World Cup only with less exoticism, becoming its
inferior in every way.
Any administrative body that considered such a measure does not care for
football as a spectacle. Then again, looking at the lack of thought applied
to the knockout stage match-ups in recent international competitions, it is
hard to identify what the administrators do care for these days, beyond
money.
In 2002, inspired by the dismal compromise of having a World Cup divided
between incompatible hosts, Japan and South Korea, progress to the final was
unavoidably restricted.
To have teams flying to and fro across Asia was deemed impractical. Skipping
between the sites was considered too great an ordeal for teams and
supporters. Therefore, the majority of countries that were drawn in the
South Korean groups had no fixtures in Japan until the final.
In essence, there were two parallel tournaments, the South Korean World Cup
and the Japanese World Cup, meeting up for one game in Yokohama at the end.
That is why Brazil and Turkey were on course to play twice. This set a bad
precedent that Euro 2008 has maintained.
At the quarter-final stage of this competition the format made sense. The
winners of group A met the runners-up in group B and vice versa. The same
for groups C and D. The mistake was pairing the winners of quarter-final 1
(A1 v B2) with the winners of quarter-final 2 (B1 v A2), which introduced
the possibility of a quick rematch of group opponents.
It would have been the work of five minutes to pair quarter-final 1 with
quarter-final 3 and quarter-final 2 with quarter-final 4, keeping group
opponents apart until the final. The semi-final games would now be Germany
versus Russia in Basle tonight and Turkey versus Spain in Vienna tomorrow.
The first and third quarter-finalists would have had 48 hours more recovery
time than their opponents, but at least the fixture would be appropriate. As
it is, they will still have a day longer to prepare, yet the price is a
fixture programme that does the competitors a disservice.
Spain are potentially the big losers here, considering events in Innsbruck on
June 10. That evening, thanks in the main to a hat-trick by David Villa and
an outstanding complementary performance by Fernando Torres, his partner up
front, Spain defeated Russia 4-1, a scoreline that should really preclude a
rematch until the last game of the competition. What Uefa is asking is that
a team, having proved their point, should have to do so again to reach the
final.
It is simply a fluke that Spain are the only team affected. Croatia were two
minutes away from being given a rematch with Germany, having beaten them 2-1
just 14 days previously. Holland could have been forced to play Italy,
having already beaten them 3-0. The Spain players, even given the fillip of
the first competitive win over Italy since the 1920 Olympic Games in
Antwerp, would not be human if it did not cross their minds that, having
comprehensively defeated Russia in the group stage, they now have everything
to lose.
At last on the threshold of a final in a leading competition after so many
years of underachievement, what humiliation if they then failed to beat a
team over whom superiority had already been established.
For Russia, the pressure is off. To win now, against a team that had inflicted
the heaviest defeat experienced at a tournament since the days when the
nation competed as the USSR, would create heroes overnight. To lose will
confirm only what we already knew, that Spain are the better team. No shame
there.
It could be advanced that Spain have the mental advantage, having already
inflicted an emphatic loss, yet the psychology of sport is more complex.
Spain, after so many years of disappointment, will already be feeling the
pressure of being, on their day, arguably the best team in the finals.
They will feel the weight of expectation and it will be doubled by facing
opponents that they know they should beat. Russia have Andrei Arshavin back
from suspension - he missed the game in Innsbruck - but if Spain were three
goals better without him, is he really worth a four-goal differential? No
doubt about it, this is Spain's semi-final to lose and it is wrong that any
team should be put in the position of having to rejustify their superiority
over a rival in a cup tournament, unless the trophy is at stake.
Spain have already survived a similar injustice in this campaign, when pitched
against their qualifying group rivals, Sweden, in the tournament group. This
also should not happen. Spain won qualifying group F by two points from
Sweden, with a 3-0 win in Madrid on November 17, 2007. Why, then, should
they have to replicate this performance when the finals begin? The point has
been made, surely.
If the teams are brought together at the knockout stage, this is a different
matter, but surely Uefa could establish that teams who meet in qualifying
are kept apart in the first round of the finals, if only for the sake of
spectacle.
As it is, if Spain are to be crowned European champions, they will have played
Sweden three times, Russia, Northern Ireland, Denmark, Latvia, Iceland and
Liechtenstein twice, and Greece, Italy and either Turkey or Germany once.
The European Championship is like one of those variety packs of cereal one
sees in supermarkets: ten boxes but only six different cereals. Where is the
variety in that?
