The Euro 2012 thread

[lestatdark]

RolStoppable said:

lestatdark said:

Sorry excuse of a german team? Just because they played shitty doesn't mean that they still had some of the best german players of their time in the lineup. That's a pretty odd way to classifiy anything .

And yeah, I agree with you in regards to Portugal's players attitudes (as I said on my previous post too). 

You are from Portugal, so you lack the direct connection to the German media I have. The Germans are usually full of themselves and this team that got beaten by Portugal was so bad that the Germans scaled back their expectations for years to come.

In 1996 they won the Euro in England. Two years later they got brutally eliminated by Croatia (0:3). In 2000 they couldn't even beat Romania and lost to a poor squad of England (who only garnered three points in that tournament; the three against Germany). That's the team you guys beat with 3:0, a team that had already lost the trust in its home country. There were no high hopes for the World Cup in 2002, Germany was incredibly happy about their second place (and they got that far because they didn't face a big team until the final). In 2004 they got eliminated again in the group stage of a Euro. In 2006 they were once again very happy about their third place. The same holds true for their results in 2008 and 2010. But now they have finally recovered. 2012 is the first time in over a decade that Germany made the title their mission.

Your win in 2000 means nothing, because the current German team is leaps and bounds better. Also, you lost the two games since then. In 2006 and 2008.

I agree that as a team, the current Germany squad is probably better than the 2000 one, as it was shown during the WC 2010 (in which they were my favourite team to go to the finals with Spain). But the 2000 squad still had some of the best german players of their time, Matthaus, Bierhoff, Ballack, Kahn, Scholl, etc. 

Just because they played badly in 2000, doesn't take away the fact that they had some very good players on their team. Arrogance might have led to their poor performance, but that's not portugal's fault now is it? 

If you want to go down that road, then the Euro 2008 win of Germany against Portugal meant nothing as well, because the Portuguese team was suffering a similar public downfall and complete lack of trust (our expectations were really, really low for that Euro) due to a lot of issues that came up during the qualifying stage (like Scolari's infamous punch, retirement of some of our best players like Figo and Pauleta and some extremely lackluster qualyfing games). Our Euro 2008 squad was probably our weakest in this past 12 years (even weaker than Portugal's WC 2002 squad).