The second game in Group A sees Portugal face Turkey at the Stade de Geneve and it promises to be a tense affair with both teams desperate to put on a good show after a difficult qualifying campaign. With both teams not wanting to put a foot wrong in their opening tie now could be a perfect time to take advantage of free bets from two of our leading partners, Betfair and Skybet, who are giving away free bets on this match and the whole of the European Championship 2008.

Portugal only lost one game during qualifying but never lived up to the hype and their 9th place in FIFA’s ranking system, and only qualified on the last game of their campaign. However, they always seem to be able to pick themselves up and perform at the major championships having reached the final in 2004 and then the semi-finals of the World Cup in 2006. In defence they have the cool character of Ricardo Carvalho and you can bet no defence is going to look forward to facing Cristiano Ronaldo, Nani and Simoa when they break on the attack. Their only real weakness is they haven’t had a settled strike partnership but with a squad that can score goals from every position this shouldn’t be a major worry and if they can believe in themselves from the start they could easily go all the way this time around. Turkey started off their qualifying campaign in blistering form, winning their first four fixtures but this form was short lived and they won only one of their next six games and qualification was looking very unlikely indeed. A 2-1 win away against Norway followed by 1-0 home win against Bosnia secured their place in Euro 2008.

Turkey will be hoping their star player, midfielder Hamit Altintop, has fully recovered from the foot injury that kept him on the sidelines since March as a lot of the plays they make go through him. Many pundits think that Turkey will struggle to qualify from the group stages after withdrawals of three key players due to injury and the coach’s decision to drop their top scorer, Hakan Suker, from the final squad. But as Greece showed in 2004 you do not need a team full of household names to be a success in this competition. Can Turkey cause an upset or will the Portuguese attack be too fast for a team which is infamous for having a lack of pace in it?

What every you think will happen you can use free bets to back it up! Betfair and Skybet are both giving free bets to new customers which can be used for this game and throughout the championships. If you chose to use Betfair for your free bets you can take advantage of their “in-game” feature allowing you to bet in real time as the action unfolds.