Last night Sweden reached the lead of Group B in the qualifying phase for the World Cup in Qatar, which Spain occupied but with one more game, by beating Greece 2-0 in the match played at the Friends Arena in Solna. The victory places the Scandinavians in the lead with 15 points, two more than the team led by Luis Enrique, when there are only two days left to play, so the confrontation between the two teams next month of November in La Cartuja.
The Swedes took a giant step towards qualifying without having to go to the Russian roulette of the play-offs and continue to depend on themselves, while Spain remains pending a failure of the team that trains ‘Janne’ Andersson. A skid that did not occur yesterday, and not because Greece – which also came to the game with options and had already won the first leg in Athens – did not try. The Hellenes were much superior in the first half, in which the local team did enough to keep a clean sheet. Tidy and fighter, John Van’t Schip’s squad did not concede a single chance in the entire first half, in which he left the weight of the game to the rival looking for danger through the counterattack.
After the resumption, the game practically followed the same course, until the Greek defender Mavropanos made a mistake and knocked down the realistic Isak in the area when he was going at speed. Forsberg converted the penalty, still with half an hour to play. Greece kept trying, although hardly without danger, but it was Isak who sentenced just ten minutes later after a long serve from Olsen.
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