The UEFA Under-21 Championship

Romanias Under-21 side have qualified for the final tournament of the European Championship after 20 years.

Bogdan Matei, 17.10.2018, 12:02

As expected by sports pundits, Romania’s under-21 side comfortably
won against Liechtenstein, 4-nil, in their final group match counting for the
European Under-21 Championship qualifying games. With 7 wins and 3 draws in 10
matches, Romania finished the qualifying campaign without losing a single
match. They accumulated 24 points in total, winning a group that also included
Portugal, Bosnia, Wales and Switzerland.

This is the second time Romania’s under-21 side qualify for the
European Championship after 1998, when they won all matches in a group that
also included Iceland, Ireland, Lithuania and Macedonia. Romania won at the
time the right to host the competition, but were eliminated in the first round
by the Netherlands and then also lost the matches for the 5th to 8th
places against Germany and Russia.

Tuesday’s win comes after an exasperating string of bad results for
Romanian football. Less than mediocre at the European Championship hosted by
France two years ago, the senior national side missed the World Cup in Russia
and now rank third out of four sides in their group in the third tier of the
League of Nations. Also, the club that represented Romania in the European cups
this year were all eliminated as early as August in the preliminary rounds.

Pundits say that the young players of Romania’s under-21 side, many
of whom play for respected clubs in Europe such as Leicester, Genoa, Palermo
and Rapid Vienna, have a different mentality, they reject mediocrity and are
thirsty for victories. They are already in the top 12 of Europe’s 53 sides and
will play in the final tournament in Italy, a country that is home to over 1
million Romanians. Ianis Hagi, one of the team’s leaders:

We are happy to make an entire country proud of us and that we’re
giving them hope again. We have achieved something that not many generations
have been able to do and now we’ll go out there and take on the other sides as
equals, because we’ve got no fear, we know we’re good, we know we’ve got
talent. I think we’ll do a good job.

This is the first international achievement as a coach for the
team’s 37-year old manager and former international player Mirel Radoi:

It’s very easy to work with them because they’re a very
closely-knit group, there’s a lot of talent in the team and that makes any
manager’s job easy. I’m the happiest man right now, because this is the biggest
achievement. It’s even more special because the last time we had this much
success was 20 years ago.

Radoi shares the praise for the qualification with Daniel Isaila,
who managed the team during the early part of the qualifying campaign, before
signing with Al-Hazem, in Saudi Arabia. Many of the Romanian under-21 players
come from the Viitorul Constanta football academy founded and run by the former
international player Gheorghe Hagi, who had 125 caps for the national side and
scored 35 goals for Romania.

Perhaps too optimistic, some voices say this young generation of
players, which includes Hagi’s own son, may even surpass that of Gheorghe Hagi
who played in three world and two European championships in the 1990s.