Euro 2008 Nonsense
Ian Symes - June 20, 2008 @ 11:45 pm
There’s a lot of nonsense that’s been written since Euro 2008 turned out to be bloody excellent. Mostly focussed, unsurprisingly, on England’s failure to qualify. The second most annoying is people saying that’s it’s been great despite England not being involved. As if the lack of England automatically makes something dull and uninteresting, and Euro 2008 being exceptional has dragged the total back up to zero.
The most annoying, though, is people saying it’s been great because England weren’t there. Ahh, didn’t expect them to have that opinion, did you? Well, they do. They think England are rubbish and they’re actually glad they didn’t qualify because they’d only have dragged it down.
The truth is that when England are in a major tournament, people in this country don’t care whether the tournament is good or not, because they’re so blindly focussed on England. It doesn’t matter if the rest of the games are brilliant or shit, it’s all about how England do. And as soon as we get knocked out, the rest of the tournament is ignored. It takes the lack of bias to make people pay attention.
Euro 2008 has been great, and it would have been with or without England. But if England had qualified, nobody would have thought to check.
Absolutely spot on.
There was a quote on Football Focus from a member of the Turkish side following there amazing smash n’ grab victory over Croatia along the lines of “We’re now one of the great footballing nations” which both Lawro and Dixon sneered at.
The question is why shouldn’t they think that about themselves? It’s not the first time this century they’ve progressed so far in a major tournament. They did it six years ago in Japan too. Whereas for our national sides last semi-final appearance we have to go back to Euro 96, and another six years before that to find the last time we made it so far without home advantage.
From the first round of games this tournament has thrown up surprise after surprise. The Dutch looked untouchable, Italy looked pensionable and yet within just over a week it’s all swung around.
Next season’s Premier League so far looks set to be another nine months all about the big four (…and Villa of course), inconsistent refereeing and over-payed egos. So hasn’t is just been great to watch nation versus nation, games played in good spirits and a tournament where no one knows who’s going to win?
Oh and thanks for the link *mwah!*
As seen on F365:
http://football365.com/mailbox/story/0,17033,8744_3731189,00.html