Here’s a question without an answer: what is the greatest tournament-winning goal ever scored? Despite a lack of superlative silverware clinchers, any debate on the subject remains pointless without considering context. A shock winner (such as the recently departed Alcides Ghiggia silencing the Maracanã in 1950) or a moment of controversy (Geoff Hurst, 1966) will linger longer in the memory than an aesthetic wonder. Sometimes, a tournament’s final, decisive moment assumes this extra significance because it perfectly frames what has gone before.
The 1990 World Cup final, where the canny West Germany overcame an agricultural Argentina, could and should not have been won by anything other than a penalty. The same could be said for Andrés Iniesta’s late winner in Johannesburg in 2010 as Spain – forced to repeatedly pick locks against cunning defences – did so one final, thrilling time. This rule applies, perhaps more than with any other winner, to Euro 2004. History has not been kind to a terrific tournament that was ultimately settled by a scruffy near-post header from a journeyman player – a moment that adds weight to the champions’ reputation as the ultimate spoilers. Then again, to loosely paraphrase Plato, beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
Angelos Charisteas was a player who was never likely to win any beauty contests. A 6ft 3in centre forward, he played in seven different leagues after breaking through at Aris Thessaloniki, never reaching double figures in a league season as he journeyed from Ajax to Arles-Avignon, from Schalke to Saudi Arabia, in search of a regular starting spot. Yet for one corner of the Mediterranean, his ordinary goal is a thing of true beauty and events on and off the pitch since have only increased its mythical status.
Fifty seven minutes into the final at Lisbon’s rebuilt Estádio da Luz, the shock finalists Greece won a corner, and what seemed to be a reprieve from deep defending against the hot favourites Portugal. Angelos Basinas delivered an out-swinging corner into the fabled corridor of uncertainty, and Charisteas made the connection, nodding the ball down beyond Ricardo and into the net. The mind’s eye has been kind to Charisteas’s moment of glory, adding a power and panache that is absent from video replays. Charisteas does not make a remarkable run, nor does he plant the ball incisively into the corner as he did in the quarter-final against France. The contact he makes, inching his head forward a fraction ahead of Costinha, sends the ball beyond the stranded Ricardo at a curious angle, while Costinha and Ricardo Carvalho, wedged helplessly either side of the forward, appeal for a free-kick that will never come.
The goal has come to represent a Greek campaign that was derided by many as ugly, defensive and uncompetitive, with the Guardian’s own Barry Glendenning labelling Greece “the only underdogs in history that everyone wants to see get beaten”. Otto Rehhagel’s team were seen as the undeserving beneficiaries of a breathless, beautiful tournament in which Italy, Spain and Germany crumbled in the group stages, Czech Republic left empty-handed after playing some of the finest football seen this century, and France’s own golden generation fell short of retaining their title. Great tournament, shame about the winners – but that is to overlook the fact that two of the heavyweights mentioned above fell to Greece. An ancient nation, recast as unpopular outsiders, taking on the modern-day rulers of Europe – suffice to say that for Greece, it wasn’t the last time.
The road that led to Charisteas’s leap was long, mixing fortune, flair and fortitude as it wound far beyond their three 1-0 knockout victories, all earned with a routine header from a right-wing cross. It arguably began three years earlier at Wembley where, in Rehhagel’s first game in charge, only a signature moment from David Beckham denied them an away win on a day when England, in truth, were outclassed. Fired with new belief, a team without a single win in a major tournament rebounded from two early qualifying defeats to win their final six group games, beating Spain in Zaragoza (yes, by a goal to nil) as they sealed a place in Portugal.
In spite of this, Greece arrived as rank outsiders, with only little Latvia less favoured by seeding or by the odds-makers. As the forgotten guests at Portugal’s opening party, the Greek team watched an opening ceremony framed around a giant medieval ship before they faced the hosts in Porto. On Greek TV, an optimistic commentator told the nation “it’s time for us to become pirates and steal the victory”. Steal it they did, racing into a 2-0 lead, playing expansive, incisive counter-attacking football, before Cristiano Ronaldo scored a late consolation. After drawing 1-1 with Spain, with Charisteas getting his first goal of the tournament, defeat to Russia proved irrelevant as Portugal’s victory over Spain, who haven’t lost a European Championship match since, sent Greece into the quarter-finals.
What happened next, depending on who you ask, was either the finest tactical performance of the century so far, or a trophy robbery that is best forgotten. While it may not have made for a dizzying spectacle, Rehhagel adjusted the team’s shape smartly for each match, playing in a lopsided fashion that destroyed France’s fluidity, keeping a spare man in defence to fight the rapid movement of the Czechs, and then changing shape to nullify Portugal’s wingers – Luís Figo and Ronaldo, no less – in the final. Harking back to that apparently throwaway line from the opening ceremony, Otto’s motley crew earned a nickname that persists to this day; Piratiko – the pirate ship.
The truth is, of course, that setting up to neutralise the opposition is nothing new, even if England routinely made a hash of it in Portugal. Plenty of tournament outsiders – not least Greece themselves – have employed this tactic in recent years without so much as a sniff of silverware. After all, if the Greek victory was so easy, so uninspiring, why has it not happened since? Greece did not require penalties, or even a full period of extra time, to progress – the centre-back Traianos Dellas’s silver goal against the Czechs in the semi-final was as close as they came to cutting it fine. Rehhagel knew that in order for this approach to deliver the ultimate goal, the sucker punch was crucial. Charisteas was central to this approach and so he was used as a spare centre-forward who focused on taking the one chance that could come his way as his team-mates harried and pressed around the pitch.
Angelos Charisteas’s headed winner for Greece in the Euro 2004 final against the host nation, Portugal.
Charisteas’s international career overlaps with Rehhagel’s reign almost exactly, and the striker saved his best work for his national coach. Just as the goal itself was symbolic of Greece’s incredible, against-all-odds victory, so the scorer was one of the dustiest jewels polished up by the German. Rehhagel wrung every drop of ability from a group of domestic sloggers and European bit-part players. Three Greeks made the team of the tournament, with Theodoros Zagorakis, once of Leicester City, named the best player ahead of a who’s who of millennial superstars. The details of how and why Greece took the trophy ahead of an assortment of golden generations was of little concern to the players as the final whistle went in Lisbon. The widespread incredulity was not confined to the watching world – as Basinas has succinctly put it since, “we couldn’t believe it”.
Euro 2004 took place at a crossroads for Greece, and Europe as a whole. The team’s victory inspired Athens’s Olympic planners, who urged workshy stadium builders to follow the football team’s example and show the world what Greece could do. The tournament began just over a month after an unprecedented EU expansion, with 10 new nations joining the union. Greece’s stunning trophy grab came amidst an era of optimism for the nation and the continent it belonged to. The boom extended to football, with Olympiakos signing Rivaldo and Yaya Touré, with the financial crisis no more than a speculative ripple in the pages of Europe’s more economically conscious publications.
From 2010 to today, Greece’s economic crisis has grown exponentially and the effects have been felt in sport as keenly as in all other walks of life. Athens’ Olympic venues lie in ruins, while Olympiakos are embroiled in a match-fixing scandal and rivals Panathinaikos have not had to update their list of record transfer fees for half a dozen years. For the third traditional heavyweight, AEK Athens, things have been even grimmer. A financial meltdown that was in its infancy in 2004, when player of the tournament Zagorakis grudgingly departed for Bologna, has forced the 11-times national champions to rebuild in Greece’s underfunded amateur leagues.
Greeks Salute The Return Of Their Victorious Football Team, led by their captain Theodoros Zagorakis as he raises the trophy during a victory fiesta at the Panathenaic Stadium in Athens, as thousands of Greeks welcomed the new UEFA Euro 2004 Champions. Facebook Twitter Pinterest
Theodoros Zagorakis raises the trophy during a victory parade at the Panathenaic Stadium in Athens. Photograph: Milos Bicanski/Getty Images
Club budgets have shrunk by 90% in a decade, as traditional industries like shipping, which once poured cash into the country’s biggest clubs, have dwindled in the gloom of austerity. Fan violence and corruption have spread like a virus, with Golden Dawn, a far-right party with links to football hooliganism, gaining political traction while facing trial for a laundry list of deeply unpleasant crimes. The prime minister, Alexis Tsipras, has tried and failed to suspend a domestic league that has fallen to economic instability, while the national team, funded by sponsors and still over-achieving at major tournaments, have become an even brighter beacon. As the Greek film-maker Nikos Kavoukidis put it, “what do we have left? Television and football.”
Robbed of the prudent stability offered for over a decade by Rehhagel and his successor, Fernando Santos, Greece’s fall from grace has been spectacular. The team lie bottom of their Euro 2016 qualifying group with two points from an available 18, including an unthinkable double defeat to the lowly Faroe Islands that has done for two managers – Claudio Ranieri and Uruguay’s Sergio Markarián. The Piratiko have also been plundered by Romania and Northern Ireland as their qualification prospects have collapsed. Having maintained a place at the top table in the world rankings for years, Greece have fallen outside the top 40.
Far from offering the respite from domestic woes that fans had hoped, the Greek football team are enduring a continental humiliation that painfully reflects reality, while soured relations with the European family have led Rehhagel to sheepishly return to the spotlight as a cuddly cultural ambassador for Germany. The search for a healthy source of national pride that has followed such straitened times has given Greece’s finest footballing hour an aura that borders on the mythical. The most important unremarkable goal in recent history is also the defining act of a story that extends in all directions from a field in Lisbon – a rough-edged, routine header that will ring through the ages.
As the man himself has said, Charisteas’s one moment in time stands in exalted isolation for the player, for the nation, and for international football. “Even in 50 years’ time, everybody will remember that I scored the goal which made Greece the champions of Europe. We wrote history.” Now that’s something we can all agree on.
Originally published The Guardian
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