Ivan Rakitić the competition. On 15 October 2008, he scored a brace in a 4–0 win at home to Andorra. On 5 September 2009, he scored the match-winning goal in a 1–0 win at home to Belarus. Croatia failed to qualify for the finals after finishing third in their group. After appearing in all of their Euro 2012 qualifiers, he was selected to be part of the Croatian squad at the Euro finals in Poland and Ukraine. Croatia were drawn in Group C together with Spain, Italy and the Republic of Ireland. Rakitić started in all three of Croatia group stage matches.
UEFA Euro 2012 former players who had each been part of European Championship winning teams: Horst Hrubesch, Marco van Basten, Peter Schmeichel and Zinedine Zidane. Teams were drawn consecutively into Group A to D. First, the Pot 1 teams were assigned to the first positions of their groups, while next the positions of all other teams were drawn separately from Pot 4 to 2 (for the purposes of determining the match schedules in each group). The draw resulted in the following groups: Eight cities were selected by UEFA as host venues. In a return to the format used at Euro 1992, Euro 1996