Football

Euro 2016 qualifications: Lithuania celebrates its second victory

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Lithuania wants to qualify to the Euro 2016. One month after promising 2-0 victory against San Marino, Lithuania faced Estonia in the second match of qualification Group E and at the second time in a row achieved the victory after Saulius Mikoliūnas found the Estonia net in the 76th minute.

Lithuanian national football team continues to surprise. The team who was seeded at the fifth place in the group before the qualifications has begun, is ranked now at the second place in Group E after England. Of course, it is very early stages of the tournament and the way to France is still long, but if Lithuania will surprise the strong Slovenian team this Sunday, it will be possible to talk about the first appearance of Lithuania in Euro 2016 championship in France.

The match against Estonia took place in Vilnius. After a pretty boring first half, the things became to be interesting in the second one. Saulius Mikoliūnas, who spent the first half on the bench, got his opportunity at the 63rd minute of the match. 13 minutes later, he opened the score after a brutal mistake of the Estonian goalkeeper and claimed 1-0 to the home team.

During the last 14 minutes of the match, team Lithuania managed to defend its goal well and to secure their second victory in a row. In the 56th minute of the match, Estonian Ken Kallaste received a red card what made the task to Estonia to equalize the score almost impossible.

In other matches in the group, England celebrated easy 5-0 at Wembley stadium in London against San Marino and took the first place in the group. Slovenia surprised Switzerland with 1-0 and based on the fourth place in the group.

Estonia, despite the loss to Lithuania, is taking now the third place which is leading to the playoffs to the Euro 2016. Switzerland is taking the fifth place and still is searching for its first victory. After two matches they still have no points and more than it, they didn’t manage to score even once!

San Marino, which is the weakest team in the group, is closing the group at the sixth place. As well as Switzerland, San Marino also didn’t score a single goal and also has zero points after two matches.

Vytautas Andriuškevičius (61’) and Egidijus Vaitkūnas (87’) from the Lithuanian team got yellow cards during the match against Estonia, while in the Estonian team Sergei Zenjov (33’) and Ken Kallaste (64’) got this card as well.

Saulius Mikoliūnas goal:

 

 

Aleksejus Podpruginas
Aleksejus Podpruginas is The Baltic Review author based in Israel

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