100 years of soccer pain, glory and a little chaos
Anyone born in the last 20 years or so would be forgiven for believing that the Greek national soccer team is a relatively successful side, but the truth is that during some 100 years of international competition it has witnessed more downs than ups. Yiannis Mamouzelos and Theodoros Davelos have for the first time detailed the magnificent highs and the painful lows in a new book. Titled «100 Years of the Greek National Team,» the book’s 430 pages cover 460 games, detail 520 players and 32 coaches and contain 100 photographs. It is a soccer fan’s dream. Soccer is not a sport that lends itself as kindly to statistics as other pursuits, such as basketball and baseball, but there isn’t a true fan who does not hide a nerdy instinct to look up the name of the player who filled the left-back spot for his team in an inconsequential game in 1973. Soccer is much more anarchic than the scientific study of numbers – «organized chaos» as it has been labeled by some pundits – and there are few stories that are more chaotic than that of the Greek national team. Mamouzelos, a veteran broadcaster with state-run ERT TV and radio, and his younger colleague Davelos have managed to strike a fine balance between compiling the statistics and recounting the anecdotes and newspaper reports. If this book were a soccer team, the facts and figures would be the solid back four of defenders while the passages written by the authors would be the skillful wingers that the crowd has really come to see. That is not to say that a flick through the statistics cannot be illuminating and entertaining in itself. For instance, you can discover that an Englishmen called Mr Bucket (no first name provided) coached Greece for one game in 1938 while a player called Stravopodis, which translates as »crooked foot,» played twice for the national side in 1974. The figures also hide some interesting details about the way that soccer has changed in Greece, as it has around the world. Take for example AEK Athens’s outstanding attacking midfielder Mimis Papaioannou, who represented Greece between 1963 and 1978. During that time he appeared 61 times for the national side and only played for one club side. Compare that to one of Greece’s current strikers, Angelos Charisteas, who in six years of playing for the national team has already appeared 56 times. During that time he has represented six club sides. This is a clear indication of how international matches have now become such a regular occurrence that they are losing their value while confirming that the era of players being loyal to one club, and vice versa, is long gone. An interesting move by the authors is to choose April 23, 1906, as their starting point to review the history of Greek soccer at an international level. It is intriguing because on that day at the Faliron velodrome, Greece’s opponent was Thessaloniki. As peculiar as this might seem now, in a period when Greece was in the midst of political and diplomatic upheaval, the organization of a soccer tournament was pretty low on the list of priorities. So, a four-team competition was organized between a Greek national side which was basically made up of players from Athens, a Smyrna side and a Thessaloniki club team. The truly international flavor was given by the Danish national team that gave Greece its first, bitter taste of world soccer by beating the Athens/national side 9-0, a day after the Greek team had beaten Thessaloniki 6-0 or 5-0, according to differing accounts. Undeterred, Greece sent a soccer team to the 1920 Olympics, where a different set of Scandinavians, the Swedes, gave it another 9-0 thrashing. Things could only get better and they did 10 years later when Greece recorded its first international victory (2-1) against Yugoslavia in Athens. Over the next 50 years there was plenty of heartbreak for Greek soccer fans as the team failed to qualify for any major tournaments until 1980 when it surprisingly made it to the European Championships in Italy. As the book clearly shows, it does not mean that the 50-year period was devoid of any moments of greatness – a 4-2 victory in 1968 over Eusebio’s Portugal in Piraeus must rank as one of the greatest displays by a Greek team; while in 1977 Greece’s 1-0 win against Russia in Thessaloniki sent shock waves around the soccer world as it meant the powerful Eastern Europeans could not make the 1978 World Cup. Since 1980, Greece’s national team has been in the thick of things. It qualified for its first World Cup in the USA in 1994. But the lack of maturity with which players, coaches and officials dealt with the situation turned out to be a bigger story than the qualification itself. The book details the squabbles over bonus payments and public appearances the team was signed up to make in the USA to satisfy the administrators’ pockets and Greek Americans who wanted to meet their all-conquering heroes. Greece played three games at the World Cup and lost them all, conceding 10 goals and scoring none. It would take a seismic shift on the international soccer landscape 10 years later to erase the painful memory of this failed American expedition. Greece’s victory at the Euro 2004 Championships in Portugal is, as one would expect, extensively covered by the book and gives soccer fans the opportunity to relive the biggest ever upset in international soccer. As the authors point out, Greece wore kits manufactured by Adidas in 2004 – the German sportswear manufacturer advertised its brand under the «impossible is nothing» slogan at the time. Greece’s victory for once gave some credence to an advertising cliche but what it also proved is that in the world of «organized chaos» the most chaotic sometimes come out on top. That certainly is a story worth reading.
