Improved but toothless Greece bows out to Croatia

Croatia snatched a goalless draw in Greece on Sunday and grabbed the all-important ticket to the World Cup finals of 2018 with a 4-1 aggregate score, due to Greece's miserable performance in the first leg in Zagreb on Thursday.

Over 20,000 Greece fans were at the stands of the Georgios Karaiskakis Stadium in Piraeus, seeing a significantly improved national team pressurize the Croats, although it lacked the edge that would have made the difference.

Greece manager Michael Skibbe changed more than half of his starting line-up, bringing in Vassilis Torosidis, Panayiotis Retsos, Costas Manolas, Panayiotis Tachtsidis, Lazaros Christodoulopoulos and Tasos Bakasetas. His 4-2-3-1 formation worked much better than the initial 3-6-1 of Zagreb three nights earlier.

In the first 45 minutes Greece was fairly solid in defense and creative in attack, but its few chances...