Bulgaria beat 3:2 Greece

Bulgaria won the third and final game in the UEFA Futsal EURO 2016 preliminary round Group A. The “lions” beat 3:2 Greece. The tournament is organized by UEFA with the special assistance of the municipality of Blagoevgrad, all matches will be played in "Skaptopara" hall.

The match between Bulgaria and Greece was interesting and dynamic. The excellent play of our goalkeeper Ismet Hadjiev should be noted. He saved a lot of dangerous situations and was with major contribution for the Bulgarian success.

Stoykov, Karageorgiev and Shutev were the scorers for Bulgaria. The goals for Greece came from Asimakopoulos and Iliadis. Although the “Lions” won their final match of the UEFA Futsal Euro qualifiers, the team didn`t succeed to qualify for the next stage of the competition. The top team in the group would automatically qualify for the next round along with the best runner up out of the six qualifying groups taking place around Europe. Whilst Bulgaria won two games and drew with Denmark, registering 7 points and a goal difference of +3, Denmark following their 9-1 victory over Gibraltar were also on 7 points but with a significantly better goal difference of +12. Consequently Denmark topped the group and gained the automatic qualification spot.

However Bulgaria still had an outside chance of qualification as the best runners up. The results around Europe were not going in Bulgaria’s favour. And at the end of the evening it ended up with Switzerland and England narrowly pinching the qualifying spot from Bulgaria, even though they had the same number of points. Switzerland claimed the final spot based on the extra number of goals scored. If Bulgaria had scored just two more goals they would have qualified.

The list of Bulgaria`s players:

Goalkeepers:

Kostadin Ivanov - captain

Ismet Hadjiev

Field players:

Georgi Karageorgiev

Daniel Dimov

Plamen Stoykov

Dimitar Petev

Filip Filipov

Rosen Datchev

Stamen Arsov