Fatih Terim, reloaded

The super-conjectural third place qualification Turkey earned to reach EURO 2016 seemingly boosted the Turkish football media's morale and fueled their loyalty to national team coach Fatih Terim (above). According to the same people, the Turkish national team and Turkish football was in a crisis just two months ago and the bells were ringing for a radical change, but now, three consecutive victories have put all of them on to the same track. Nowadays, almost no one talks about how the Turkish national team struggled to qualify until the last moment where Iceland and Czech Republic easily guaranteed their seats weeks before the end of the qualifiers. For instance, one of those "optimistic" columnists, Uğur Meleke from Milliyet wrote:

"One of our opponents, Spain, is on the verge of completely healing from the post-Xavi trauma, but they are still not as compact as Germany or France. The Croatians, on the other hand, will be able to see their golden generation playing maturely and (Ivan) Rakitic, (Luka) Modric, (Ivan) Perisic, (Marcelo) Brozovic and (Mario) Mandzukic are capable of changing the course of the tournament. Nevertheless, we already know that we are a better team than the Czech Republic that we played against in the qualifications, thus I believe we can move until the semi-finals by getting four points in this group and being one of the best third placers."

First of all, even though what Meleke meant by saying "post-Xavi trauma" is a bit vague, I assume that he points out the Spanish national team's disaster at the World Cup, which most people associate with the "expired" tiki-taka game. However, if that is the case, there is a serious misinterpretation of the story by Meleke here. Spain did not nose dive in the group stages because of Barcelona's classic strategy, in contrast, it was the result of a misinterpretation of Atletico Madrid's success by coach Vicente Del Bosque and negating all the inner connections of the team by putting Diego Costa as striker.

Therefore, given the Spanish national team and Barcelona proved the validity of their system again last season, the Turkish national team should expect a dominant, pressing and, of course, compact Spain.

On the other hand, it is really amusing to see how the Czech Republic became an easy target for the Turkish national team, or at least for the Turkish columnists. The same team, which Meleke claims we will have few problems with, was able to beat Turkey, the Netherlands and Iceland in the qualifiers, and finished the group in first place. Added to that, I really wonder which aspect of the Turkish national team makes Czech Republic an easy target, or in other words, what has Fatih Terim done well and consistently in the group stages that makes Meleke so sure about Turkey? The eternal mistake made by the Turkish football community is putting individually successful players together and expecting them to work well collectively and comparing to teams by the talent of their players.

I could have made the same comments about Croatia too, but "unfortunately" they have scary individual talents that the Turkish football media is afraid of. However, the Croatian national team has developed a promising generation and almost all their coaches have accumulated the knowledge of similar playing styles. Thus, what particularly makes Croatia dangerous is not just their separate weapons, but also the style that head coach Ante Cacic created.

Finally, it will be an interesting tournament to watch, and to see how Terim will develop solutions on the road. He overcame a lot of problems in the qualification period, he will need them even more in France.