Qualifiers for the Euro 2016 tournament begin this weekend,a tournament wich will be hosted by France and so we continue the series of special articles! For our reddit readers and fans we started to translate our articles into english espeacially the ones from the special category.
In 1960, UEFA organized the first European Football Championship in the history and the final torunament was hosted by France, confirmed only after finding the four teams qualified for the semifinals.
Back then the tournament competition format was completely different. From competition lacked strong national teams such as West Germany, England and Italy.
At the start of the competition lined up 17 national teams and the Northern Ireland and Czechoslovakia have played a preliminary tour wich decided who enters the first stage of the European Championship. After 2-0 at Dublin, the Irish team Bratislava were defeated 4-0 at Bratislava and the Czechs went on with the score of 4-2.
Romania and Greece have attended this frist tournament but didn't get trough the last 4 teams !
The 16 teams remaining in the competition were drawn to decide the 8 matches in the first round and Romania also present in this phase, had succeeded Turkey after the 3-0 win in Bucharest and 2-0 loss at Istanbul. Greece was also present at this stage of the competition but was eliminated by France with the general score of 8-2, 7-1 at Paris and 1-1 at Athens. In the first leg match legendary footballer Just Fontaine had to score 2 times.
Quarterfinals
In quarters had to walk the 8 teams that qualified from the first round, namely: Romania, France, Austria, Portugal, Yugoslavia, Spain, Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union. In this phase of the easiest proved to the Soviet Union, a country that had to go into the semifinals thanks to abandon of Spain who refused to do the trip to Moscow. Romania would be eliminated by Czechoslovakia after 0-3 in Bucharest and 2-0 Bratislava. As Yugoslavia managed to defeat Portugal with 6-3 on aggregate the final torunament, wich only began now, would be composed of three communist countries.
The Final Tournament
At this point Uefa had to choose the host for the semifinals and the finals and since France was the only viable choice they were chosen to host these 4 final matches. Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union were all 3 comunist countries and Uefa didn't want to choose one of them for that reason so the games where to be played in Paris and Marseille.
Semifinal matches were played in one leg and the Soviet Union defeated Czechoslovakia smoothly at Marseille 3-0.
France had to struggle in the company of Yugoslavia and finally lost the semifinal with 5-4. While there were 30 minutes left to play France was ahead with 4-2 but the dramatic ending of the game left the galics out of the big final hosted at their capital town , Paris.
In the small final Czechoslovakia took advantage of a demoralized France team and win 2-0 at Marseille.
A day later on July 10 in Paris took place the big final, the first ever final of the Uefa European Championship and the soviets won in the second half of extra-time after Ponedelnik's goal in the 113 minutes. After 90 minutes the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia were even 1-1 so the game had to go into extra-time were the soviets wrote the first page of the European Torunament winning the final in a cold war era were football was rising more and more.
This article was translated from here and was written and translated by myself. Hope you enjoyed it and if so come back later for more interesting articles about world wide football. This is my first blog post, see you next time :)
