LISBON, 29 June 2004 — An outstanding Euro 2004 championship will be remembered as the best ever if this week’s semifinals and final produce anything like the drama and high quality action seen at the tournament so far.
Hosts Portugal, riding a roller-coaster which has sucked the entire country along in its slipstream, face a beatable but vastly improved Netherlands team in the opening semi at the Jose Alvalade stadium in Lisbon tomorrow.
The winners of that game will know their opponents on Thursday after outsiders Greece, who shocked champions France in the last eight, meet the favorites from the Czech Republic at the Dragao Stadium in Porto.
Portugal, like the Dutch losing semifinalists at Euro 2000, hope to end an unhappy sequence for host nations by becoming the first since France in 1984 to reach the final.
Before the tournament started their Brazilian coach Luiz Felipe Scolari said their objective was to reach the last four. Now they have done that, they have the final in Lisbon’s Luz stadium on Sunday firmly in their sights.
Since Michel Platini’s great French team won the Henri Delaunay Cup in Paris on June 27, 1984 — beating Portugal in a memorable semifinal on the way — the hosts have always failed at the semifinal stage. The Dutch have famously inflicted defeat on a host nation in the semifinals before. Their 2-1 win over West Germany at Hamburg in 1988 is regarded as one of the most dramatic games played in the competition.
With the teams drawing 1-1 and with extra time approaching, the Dutch won the game with an 89th minute strike from Marco van Basten, whose volley in the final against the Soviet Union four days later remains the best goal scored in the competition’s history.
The Czechs, either in their former guise as Czechoslovakia or as the modern Czech Republic, are in the semis or the equivalent for the fifth time in their history. They qualified for the first European Championship in 1960 when the finals comprised just four teams and finished third after losing 3-0 to the Soviet Union, before beating France 2-0 in the third-fourth place match in Marseille. In 1976 Czechoslovakia — with Czechs Ivo Viktor, Zdenek Nehoda and Antonin Panenka in the side — won the competition with a penalty shootout victory over West Germany in Belgrade.
