“Get ready Cristiano, you are next!”. President of North Macedonia Stevo Pendarovski may have been half-joking after watching his side condemn Italy to a second consecutive World Cup absence, but Portugal have been left in no doubt that they cannot afford to take Tuesday’s play-off final lightly.
“These games are not a joke,” warned boss Fernando Santos. “It’s like a final and anything can happen… A team that goes to Italy and beats the European champions doesn’t need introductions.”
It is not the first time the nation, which only became independent in 1991, has risen to prominence. Their first formal match was played in 1993, when record goalscorer Goran Pandev was already 10 years old.
In the mid-2000s, he would go on to spearhead a team (still playing under its former name of Macedonia) which impressed the world in a narrow 1-0 defeat to England, coming within a goal-line clearance of a late equaliser. Worse was to come for Steve McClaren’s doomed Euro 2008 qualifying campaign when Macedonia travelled to Old Trafford to face a team featuring Wayne Rooney, Steven Gerrard and Frank Lampard and left with a goalless draw.
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John Toshack won just one of his eight games in charge between 2011-12 and his reign ended in a row over his refusal to move to the Balkan region – which he considered “a bit of a joke, given that 95 per cent of the squad was based outside of Macedonia”.
If there was one positive from his time in charge, it was the Welshman’s emphasis on bringing through a new generation, aided by the sudden interest of Real Madrid and Barcelona’s academies in young Macedonian talent.
They now face a similar battle, hoping to prove they are more than just Pandev. Toshack had a point; now, almost all of their international players are based in other countries, and an understanding of the top European leagues has been crucial to their development.
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Then there are Stole Dimitrievski (Rayo Vallecano) and Darko Churlinov (Schalke), who have ventured to Spain and Germany respectively.
Darko Pancev was the trail-blazer, scoring the winning penalty in the 1991 European Cup final with Red Star Belgrade, but he has been surpassed in reputation by Pandev, who was the first North Macedonian to score 100 goals in one of the top five European football leagues.
The guard is now changing. Since Pandev’s retirement at the end of Euro 2020, where North Macedonia lost all three games, former Leeds winger Ezgjan Alioski has become the most high-profile of their veteran heroes.
Milevski is gradually looking to a crop of younger stars, epitomised by Elmas, and they now sit 67th in the Fifa rankings. That is remarkable in itself when just five years ago, they had crashed down to 166th.
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That North Macedonia have been steadily growing their reputation is not to underplay the unlikeliness of victory over Italy.
A year ago, when they beat Germany – Die Mannschaft’s first World Cup qualifying defeat for 20 years – some demanded that Joachim Low step down early. “It’s over, Jogi,” the press told him. Such was the embarrassment at losing to one of European football’s minnows, a country with a population of just 1.8 million, a quarter of whom live in just one city.
Italy head coach Roberto Mancini now faces similar questions and Santos is determined that he will not be next, urging his players to “show the same respect to North Macedonia that we would to Italy”.
Captain Stefan Ristovski believes they deserve it. “Can we beat Portugal? Yes, we will win. We will do everything to win and we will do it.”
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