Jeff StrasserPHOTO: UWE ANSPACH/DPA
Two more wins and Luxembourg would qualify for the European Championships. About the sports boom and the times when the Grand Duchy lost to the Faroe Islands.
Jeff Strasser still remembers what Luxembourg football looked like in the worst times. Defeats against the Faroe Islands and Liechtenstein, a calendar year without a goal of his own and a team in which he stood out as a Bundesliga player because the rest consisted mainly of students and employees with football as a hobby. “There was a time when I was the only legionnaire. It wasn’t always easy to play these games. “There were a lot of defeats,” said the 49-year-old, who was already used as a playmaker in the national team due to a lack of alternatives.
In spring 2024 the perspective is completely different. Two wins still separate the Grand Duchy from taking part in the European Championships for the first time. If they win on Thursday (6 p.m./DAZN) in Georgia and on Tuesday at home against Greece or Kazakhstan, Luc Holtz’s team can travel to Germany – and compete in the same preliminary group as Portugal’s superstar Cristiano Ronaldo. The games on the big European Championship stage in Dortmund and Gelsenkirchen are closer than ever.
“Golden” qualifications
That would no longer be a sensation. “You could compare it to Iceland taking part. “A nation with a small population that has managed to build a structured and functioning team,” Strasser told the German Press Agency. There was already an impressive win against the European Championship quarter-finalists and World Cup participants Iceland in the 2023 European Championship qualification. In a qualifying group, Luxembourg beat Iceland and Bosnia-Herzegovina.
That also seems possible against Georgia. “You should just try to gild it. The team that has something to lose is Georgia,” said Strasser. The fact that Naples star Khwitscha Kvarazchelia, who alone is worth two and a half times as much as the entire Luxembourg national team, is missing in Georgia due to a ban could also help the outsider in the duel in Tbilisi. “When you are so close, you also want to go to the European Championships. “We are convinced that we can make the impossible possible and make sports history,” said head coach Holtz.
The president has served Luxembourg football for over 50 years
Luxembourg only has around 600,000 inhabitants and is as small in area as Saarland. But the rise in football is no coincidence. The club opened a national academy in 2001 and has subsequently greatly professionalized its training. As a legionnaire, Strasser would no longer be the exception but the rule. Leandro Barreiro (FSV Mainz 05) and Christopher Martins Pereira (Spartak Moscow) are the figureheads of the team, which no longer has any active regulars in the Luxembourg league.
On the one hand, the face of the promotion is national coach Holtz, who has looked after the team since 2010 and has gradually led them upwards. There is also association president Paul Philipp, who has served Luxembourg football uninterruptedly for over 50 years: first as a national player, then as national coach and now as association president since 2004.
As President Philipp recently made clear, advancement does not only offer opportunities. “We need to make it clear to people at home that we cannot grow at the rate at which we have grown over the last six years. We are a village, we will never be world champions. We are small and will always remain small.”
Strasser can only watch to a limited extent
The national players are now professionals and play in other European countries. But the fact that Laurent Jans from Waldhof Mannheim, a German third division professional, is captain and undisputed leader shows that quality has its limits. With a view to the unique European Championship opportunity, Jans told “Mannheimer Morgen”: “Of course this is something really big for us – as a national team, as a country, also for me personally.”
Former professional Strasser – 98 international matches, seven goals, three wins – will only be able to partially follow the game in Georgia. The former professional from 1. FC Kaiserslautern and Borussia Mönchengladbach said he would watch the first half. After that he would be hired as a coach on the pitch. Strasser coaches the Luxembourg first division club FC Progrès Niederkorn.
Credit article:www.noz.de
