Somewhere inside the Pankritio Stadium on Friday evening, probably around the time England complete their 150th pass and somebody mentions patience, Greece will be waiting.
That is the basic arrangement.
England will have the ball. Greece will mostly allow them to have it. Sarina Wiegman’s side will move it from Keira Walsh to Leah Williamson, out towards Lucy Bronze, back inside, across again, looking for the tiny structural defect that turns eleven organised defenders into several people suddenly pointing at one another.
Greece, meanwhile, would quite like England to make one mistake.
Football can spend millions on analysts before arriving at something pleasingly primitive.
This is the first senior meeting between Greece Women and England Women, and it comes with rather more consequence than such an introductory handshake should reasonably contain. The first leg of their 2027 FIFA Women’s World Cup qualification play-off takes place in Heraklion on Friday 9 October, before the return match at Leicester’s King Power Stadium four days later.
The winner still will not have qualified for Brazil.
They earn another play-off against Slovakia or Ukraine.
England were not supposed to be here.
England are European champions. Unfortunately, Spain still exist
Five victories from six qualifiers would ordinarily suggest everything had gone rather well.
Unfortunately for England, one of the six was a 4-0 defeat against Spain in Majorca.
Spain won Group A3, England finished second, and because only the League A group winners received automatic qualification, the reigning back-to-back European champions were sent towards the play-offs.
This was framed as something approaching a minor crisis, because international football has become very good at turning slightly inconvenient administrative outcomes into existential events.
England remain ranked fourth in the world. They reached the 2023 World Cup final. They won Euro 2022 and then, just to establish that the first one was not administrative error, won Euro 2025 as well.
Greece are ranked 59th.
Wiegman has been refreshingly uncomplicated about the situation.
“We have great respect for Greece but our expectations of ourselves are clear,” she said. “We are here to win these two games, deliver strong performances, and move one step closer to securing our place at the World Cup.”
Managers are occasionally required to publicly confirm that they intend to win football matches.
Chloe Kelly and Ella Toone have discovered that history expires
The more interesting England story began before the squad boarded the plane.
Chloe Kelly and Ella Toone are not here.
Not injured. Not retired. Dropped.
This is unusual partly because of who they are and partly because international football encourages us to treat tournament heroes as permanent pieces of furniture.
Kelly scored the winner in the Euro 2022 final. She converted the decisive Finalissima penalty against Brazil, scored England’s winning penalty against Nigeria at the 2023 World Cup and then delivered the winning spot-kick when England defended their European title in 2025.
Those moments remain.
The squad place does not.
“There is big competition going on and that is basically what it is.”
There was sympathy afterwards, naturally. There should be. But Wiegman also delivered the important bit.
“It’s about talent, it’s about playing minutes and it’s about the competition going on.”
Kelly has played only 124 WSL minutes this season. Toone has begun the campaign without a league goal or assist.
Football remembers forever while simultaneously caring almost exclusively about Tuesday.
Since January 2020, England have played only three matches without either Kelly or Toone appearing. They won all three, by an aggregate score of 9-2.
The Lionesses will probably survive.
Alessia Russo carries the familiar responsibility
The omissions push a little more attention towards Alessia Russo.
If you are searching for Alessia Russo stats before kick-off, the central numbers are 67 England appearances and 30 international goals. Last season she also scored 22 goals with eight assists across the WSL and Champions League for Arsenal.
Her 30th England goal arrived against Iceland in April, moving her into the Lionesses’ all-time top ten scorers.
The slightly strange thing about Russo is that she now feels almost institutional despite only being 27.
She is expected to lead the line. Expected to occupy centre-backs. Expected to provide the finishing point to England’s enormous territorial advantage.
Against Greece, patience may matter more than volume.
Maria Gkouni-Papaioannou is only 21, but the AEK centre-back has built her reputation around precisely the type of defending this match should demand: headers, contact, concentration and the willingness to spend long periods without the ball before doing something unpleasant to whoever receives it.
“We will be a very competitive team,” she said. “We will show courage, confidence and certainly it is a game worth watching for everyone.”
Greece have discovered something England cannot manufacture
There is a temptation to describe Greece exclusively through England.
The underdogs. The low block. The team expected to lose.
That misses something.
Greece won all four of their League C4 qualifiers, scoring 11 goals against Georgia and the Faroe Islands. They arrive unbeaten in seven overall matches and have never qualified for either a Women’s World Cup or European Championship.
That is precisely why Friday matters.
Manager Vasilis Spertos has spoken about something called “omopsychia”, essentially collective spirit or unity.
“The analysis that we did with my staff showed that in previous matches we dominated, but those are the measurable things, goals, assists, possession,” he explained.
“For us, the most important of all are the unmeasurable qualities.”
Then came the interesting part.
“One player playing not just for the crowd, but together with the crowd. Giving such energy inside the pitch that the supporters outside give back a second and third wave of energy.”
There will be free admission through Gates 9 to 13 at Pankritio Stadium.
The Greek federation clearly understands that if you cannot close the ranking gap, filling seats costs considerably less.
Greece’s counter-attacking threat is real
England should dominate possession.
Seventy per cent would surprise nobody.
The relevant Niamh Charles stats entering this window are 34 England appearances, with no senior international goals. At club level, she left Chelsea after 178 appearances and 13 goals across six seasons.
But possession is one of football’s more misleading comforts. You can have the ball for six consecutive minutes and still find yourself sprinting towards your own goal because somebody misplaced a five-yard pass.
Greece have players capable of creating exactly that moment.
Rangers forward Calliste Brookshire has scored three times in nine internationals and understands the scale of the assignment.
“You can’t downplay England,” she said. “They’re one of the best teams in the world, so being together as a group and everyone knowing their role on and off the field is going to be so important.”
Then came the sentence England should pay more attention to.
“We know that we will get some chances.”
They probably will.
Lucy Bronze remains likely to spend considerable portions of the game operating closer to the Greek penalty area than her own, creating the space Brookshire would most like to attack.
For those keeping count of Lucy Bronze games for England, the Chelsea defender enters this window on 148 senior caps with 22 goals, placing her third on the Lionesses’ all-time appearance list.
That experience matters.
So does having someone behind her when she goes wandering.
Lexi Potter is the interesting new variable
England’s squad also contains something Greece have never seen before.
In fairness, neither have England.
Twenty-year-old Lexi Potter has received her first senior call-up after starting three of Chelsea’s opening four league games.
Her 93.2 per cent passing accuracy and 80 per cent dribble completion offer the sort of numbers coaches adore because they suggest both safety and adventure, two concepts football spends enormous amounts of time attempting to reconcile.
Wiegman seems particularly impressed by her simplicity.
“What I’ve seen from her is she comes out on the pitch and just plays,” she said. “She is comfortable.”
That sounds mundane.
It isn’t.
International football is full of very talented players suddenly behaving as though the ball has been replaced by an unexploded device.
Potter apparently does not.
Alongside Walsh, Stanway or Jess Park, she offers Wiegman another way of moving Greece around rather than simply attempting to overwhelm them.
How tall is Hannah Hampton?
Since this is the internet and somebody will inevitably ask, how tall is Hannah Hampton?
The England Football profile lists the Chelsea goalkeeper at 173cm, or 5ft 8in, while Chelsea’s own profile lists her at 1.75m. Football has therefore managed to create a two-centimetre dispute around someone standing still.
More importantly, Hampton enters the tie as England’s established number one with 29 senior caps and 11 clean sheets.
Where is Niamh Charles from, and where does she fit?
Another useful option is Niamh Charles, now of Manchester City following her move from Chelsea.
For anyone wondering where Niamh Charles is from, she was born on the Wirral Peninsula and came through West Kirby Wasps before progressing through Liverpool’s system.
Her usefulness here is obvious.
If England need another full-back capable of essentially becoming a winger, Charles can do it. If Wiegman wants more conservative control, she can provide that too.
England should win. That is not quite the same as saying they will
England have better players.
They have vastly greater tournament experience.
Russo, Bronze, Williamson, Walsh, Stanway and James have spent years playing matches carrying considerably more pressure than this.
Greece know all of that.
The interesting thing is that Spertos does not appear particularly bothered.
“We must play as one tightly-bound unit,” he said, “using the Greek soul to reach as high as possible.”
There are worse plans.
England will arrive with medals, expectations and a qualification campaign that became unnecessarily complicated after one awful evening against Spain.
Greece arrive with four qualifying victories, free tickets, a stadium beside the Cretan sea and an opportunity nobody seriously expected them to have.
The likely outcome remains an England victory.
But Greece do not need to be better than England for 90 minutes.
They merely need to make England uncomfortable for long enough that everybody starts noticing the clock.
Crete waits at dusk
England carry old medals
One mistake changes all
How to watch Greece Women vs England Women on TV in the UK
Greece Women vs England Women will be shown live on ITV1 in the UK, with the Lionesses beginning their 2027 Women’s World Cup qualification play-off in Crete. The first leg takes place on Friday 9 October 2026, with kick-off at 5.30pm BST.
Fans can also watch Greece vs England Women live online via ITVX. The match is being played at the Pankritio Stadium in Heraklion, before England host Greece in the second leg at Leicester City’s King Power Stadium on Tuesday 13 October.
