Georgios Samaras is convinced that Greece have the bottle to make it through to the last eight of the European Championships.
Forty-five minutes into their Group A opener against Poland the forecast looked bleak with the co-hosts one goal up and the Greeks down to ten men following the harsh sending off of Sokratis Papastathopoulos.
The half-time talk from coach Fernando Santos must have been inspiring with the ten men equalising through Dimitris Salpingidis in the 51st minute and being denied a winner when substitute keeper Przemys?aw Tyto? saved a penalty from Giorgos Karagounis midway through the second half.
Greece face the Czech Republic on Tuesday with Samaras convinced that his side have the mentality to succeed.
“It doesn’t matter how bad things might look this Greek team never gives up and don’t like to lose,” the Celtic striker stated. “That’s a quality you cannot buy. It’s all about mentality that’s why we’re here and it’s what will keep us going.
“We’ve 23 players who can all come in and make a difference. That’s why we got this far. I’m not saying we can win it. We have to have realistic targets. What happened in 2004 was like a miracle and that’s not going to happen again.
“We are just trying our best to get through to the knock out stages. If we can do it that will be a success.
“We didn’t win on Friday but everybody was happy because they could see how hard we tried for them. If the people see we are giving 100 per cent they will be satisfied with us.”
Samaras added: “Now it’s all about trying to rest as much as we can so we are ready for the Czech Republic.
“What we are trying to do is play good and give some smiles to the people back in Greece.
“I know we have a lot of problems as a country but football and sport in general can still give the people a good feeling, the kind of feeling you can’t find anywhere else. That’s our job.
“We realise these are difficult times for our country and we have a chance here to make them feel a little bit better.
“I don’t want to talk about friends and family back home. There are problems for everyone but that’s a private issue.
“On Friday we knew that back in Greece we had given the people a reason to smile again.”
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Purely on a footballing perspective, Russia will win this group with some ease the rest are merely making up the numbers.
Hopefully Cheeko Green is watching this group carefully with his list of 19 players he has targetted for Rangers…Russia & Lewandowski apart there is very little to get excited about.