It’s unchartered territory for Switzerland and Poland, who have both reached the knockout stage of a European Championship finals for the first time.
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Polish striker Jakub Błaszczykowski opened the scoring in Saturday’s game in France when he eluded the Swiss defence to land the ball in the net in the 37th minute.
At the edge of the box Xherdan Shaqiri performed a pitch-perfect over-head bicycle-kick, so pending something extraordinary, that’s the goal of the tournament.
After praising the Swiss, he turned to his attentions to his own team: “This match sparked a lot of emotions and my players did a great job”.
The match went to a penalty shootout after the regulation 90 minutes saw both sides tied 1-1 and extra time also failed to determine the victor.
Quoted by the Daily Mail, Arsenal midfielder Granit Xhaka has promised to bounce back from his penalty miss for Switzerland.
It was suggested the former Borussia Dortmund centre-forward could perhaps be poised to spring into life in the quarter-finals in Marseille on Thursday, an assertion Fabianski readily agreed with. Their best player still hasn’t made a decision to show up yet.
Neither side were able to find the all-important third goal of the game, and in turn, it led to Xhaka missing from the penalty spot, with Poland converting all five of their spot-kicks to march on.
Croatia dominated early on but they weakened over time against Portugal as the two sides had a hard fought and tepid 0-0 draw until Portugal dramatically stole a 1-0 victory in extra time.
For Poland, captain Robert Lewandowski, Arkadiusz Milik, Kamil Glik, Blaszczykowski and Grzegorz Krychowiak all converted the penalty kicks in the shoot-out.
Complimented on his outstanding goal, Shaqiri joked: “You don’t know me so well – I always score nice goals”.
Lewandowski may have tucked away the first penalty for Poland but the Bayern Munich striker is yet to score a goal in the tournament.
“Robert Lewandowski is doing phenomenal work for this team”.
Blaszczykowski, who plays for Italy’s Fiorentina, has scored 18 goals in 83 appearances for Poland.
The Swiss emerged from the break with plenty of intensity but struggled to carve out any clear cut chances as Xherdan Shaqiri did his best to spark his team to life.
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“We are happy to bring so much pleasure to our fans but now we’re thinking of the next match”, Nawalka said. But the important thing is that my team showed potential after conceding the equaliser. “They are professional players – they [should] know they have to go to the other side to celebrate. We created many chances and we scored a goal but we could have scored more and more goals and then we would have had total control of the match”, Nawalka said.
