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Euro Early Doors by Mickey Blue Eyes Fanzine Writer Of The Year 2008

As England didn’t qualify for Euro 08 in Austria-Switzerland I am reduced to watching the games on TV, which is not my favourite form of footy spectating. Most TV commentators and pundits wouldn’t qualify to empty your bin, never mind stick their noses in your living room. Radio commentators are only slightly better even after you jettison stupid, hysterical and unwanted Alan Green on BBC Radio Five. The best thing to do with these useless appendages is to watch the match only, sod the “punditry,” mute the sound on your TV and tune into a radio commentator you like, or wait for a TV commentator you admire. It works, people, it works. It might even stop you throwing an empty beer can at the set.

But I mistimed the Switzerland V Czech Republic Saturday starter by fifteen minutes and found myself viewing an opening tableau that wouldn’t have been out of place in a 1973 episode of Doctor Who. Out there on the pitch several hundred large coloured cardboard boxes with furry legs milled around in uncertain choreography and were occasionally injected with papier maché sculptures supposedly representing hosts Austria-Switzerland. One of them meant to look like a skier in streamlined downhill mode, I swear, looked like a fat burglar crouching to take a crap on the head of its bearer. This was all unintentionally hilarious and well worthy of the Eurovision Song Contest because at stadium level you simply couldn’t tell what it was all supposed to mean. To understand it you had to hover in an overhead blimp. It had you wondering how its creators sold their presentation to the UEFA Suits and how on Earth the footy knobheads actually bought the sales pitch. Occasional crowd close-ups showed a bemused looking group of speckies asking each other what the fuck was going on despite a plethora of aerial shots on the big screens. Of course it demonstrated zero about footy or “European unity” but it did illustrate why the Gnomes of Zurich are qualified to do nothing better than look after all the corrupt, gangster-ridden hot money from around the world.

By the time you picked yourself off your living room floor laughing you just caught the national anthems. The Czech one was a dirge sung by a very large, round and sad- looking man in a cumberbund who placed his right hand over his left chest as though defending his wallet, while the Swiss, determined not to be outdone on home turf, had a hyped up Julie Andrews lookalike singing something from a Sound of Music production while trying not to yodel. On my oath, I am not making any of this up. If there is any consolation in any of it I suppose it is in the possible reverse affect it might have on dithering nationalists. I mean, who in their right mind – except possibly nazis, Berlusconi, Yank Republicans and the London and Bootle BNP – would want to be connected with THAT basket of old fish heads? The paradox for everyone is that nationalist nonsense is part of the raison d’être for such competitions. We all know, for example, that a tiny minority of British Isles fans (that is, England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland) are little more than rampaging, drunken racist yobs in dire need of therapy and/or long term incarceration, and that most other countries also have the same genetic mutation as was demonstrated in Klagenfürt before the Germany V Poland match on Sunday. Hopefully Euro 08 won’t suffer from it too much, but I wouldn’t make book on it………..Then take it a step further and ask yourself what is the difference between nationalist nonsense and home grown regional chauvinist garbage.…………

It was a relief to get to the footy and the opening game refereed by Roberto Rossi. In some respects the Italian turned out to be the best thing in the match, trying his best to keep the game going and ignoring the petty stuff as long as he dare. He managed it admirably. The spectacle itself was only a slight improvement on other tournament openers, most of which are tinged with nerves and fear. Invariably the home team reacts to the crowd with sporadic bursts of enthusiasm while the away team contain them and try to do them with a quick raid. At its worst this can be the kind of thing that helped eviscerate attendances in the 70s and 80s. However the current era has gone a long way to reversing that trend and this match showed it. It was mostly mediocre, but not wretched, and very occasionally not bad at all.

One of the broadcast features was yet more evidence of the video toy boys’ search for the holy grail of TV sports, the comprehensive true 3D shot of the action. This time it was a continuation of the overhead tracking camera experiment in 2D, which in truth is as much a turkey as the short-lived perimeter link cameras tryouts. Both have a lot of promise but so far they just don’t give the kind of useful visual coverage that would signal a breakthrough. When it comes it will of course include all of these elements. Until then you are left with a shrug and a “So what?” when the novelty wears off after a few minutes. Apart from an absence of linkage the main visual problem is that everything is in wide angle and “flat” even with a tracking movement. None of it remotely approaches the experience of being present. And it never will. Which is why we buy our season tickets. Meantime, ultraslomo makes hindsight genii out of all of us and monkeys out of referees equipped with mere human perception and seconds in which to judge.

The first twenty minutes of the game were as energetic as you would expect. The Swiss were boosted by the crowd and had six shots and a couple of narrow misses without persuading they were that much better than the Czechs. In this period local hero Behrami at wide right stood out for effort and blond streaked hair until he was twigged as a one trick pony and got snuffed to the bench later on. The Czech system seems built by the veteran Brückner around four defenders who play in Italian cattenacio and were well versed in ushering attackers out to the wing and then harmlessly to the corner flag, a straightforward tactic the Swiss didn’t have the players to counter with. It’s frustrating to play against and positively irritating to watch if it gets endemic. Every now and then the Czechs, quick and strong, would manufacture a clever attack that promised much but then petered out around the edge of the Swiss penalty box. They too were short of a decisive thrust and over reliant on the giant Koller as lone striker. 0-0 at half time slightly flattered the Czechs.

The first booking came a quarter hour into the second half when Rossi’s patience finally gave out and he yellow-carded a persistent Czech offender. This goaded the home team into some intense attacking moves for the next ten minutes, and then the seeming inevitable happened when they let one in to a breakaway and some lousy midfield play. The ball pinged around a few metres in front of the D, the Swiss failed to clear and the guy who substituted for Koller ran through slightly left and right-shinned it in past the keeper’s left hand. After which the Czechs got stronger, survived some late attacks, a bar rebound, penalty appeals and three minutes added time and got to the final whistle with a win. You couldn’t say either team looked like it would do something in the competition, though they might just be slow starters and, as usual, anything can happen. Look who won the last one, and who can forget the wild-card Danes of 1992?

The evening game – much better – was Portugal V Turkey starring Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers for the Iberians, and the usual gang of assorted small-time thugs for the Footy Sick Men of Europe. I am pleased to report it was virtually one way traffic in the direction of the Turkish goal. In the end, a late 2-0 defeat flattered them. Off the pitch, the continuing saga of Fred versus Ferguson only further illustrates that if a player wants to leave the best thing you can do is get the best deal your circumstances allow. Threats never work either way. Only a position of strength matters when making a business deal, all the rest is nonsense. The mancs are best asking for a zillion sterling and letting him get on with it and they with their own future. In this match Ronaldo had a few good runs, switched position a few times and had two men on him almost all the time, had a brilliant shot equally brilliantly tipped onto a post by the ‘keeper, but failed to make a decisive impact, probably because of all the background shenanigans. Even the goals were a touch spawny despite Portugal’s overwhelming superiority. Still, they looked ominously good; then again, they looked good in the last Euro too until Greece did them up like they did everyone else.

Sunday’s first game was Austria V Croatia from Vienna. The home team have been pretty hapless for a few years now so nobody expected too much from them, while the Croats had done a number on an England team too preoccupied with checking its collective bank balance and feeling sorry for itself if its passing got even more erratic and inexplicable. (It’s going to be very difficult to erase the memory of forlorn Steve McLaren standing at the touchline with a multicoloured golf umbrella to protect him from the rain. In fact the England team got exactly what it deserved from a series of awful, self-pitying displays – failure to qualify. But not all of it was down to McLaren.) It was Churchill who once said, “Nothing good ever came out of the Balkans,” but that was before they started to take footy seriously. And once Tito died the pits of Balkans nationalism and sectarianism destroyed the old Yugoslav federation in civil war during the 90s. Extreme nationalism still lurks, even in Europe. Croatian nationalist fervour is evident to anyone who wants to keep their eyes open.

You feared the worst for Austria when Croatia rightly got and scored a penalty in the third minute and then ran rings around the homesters for the first third of the game. During this spell poor Austria looked like a collection of healthy young alpine farm boys in lederhösen facing a gang of city spivs in a squadron of fast cars. However, they had the courage and determination to stick with it and gradually got themselves back into the game before half time. Then as the second half wore on they began to dominate until the Croats were really rocking in the final quarter hour. Unfortunately shots and crosses got banged in, especially from their right wing, without much thought and were headed and booted away or well saved in increasing desperation. Right at the death there was a classic header hairsbreadth miss by the Austrians that had their speckies in the kind of agony we endured against Fiorentina. You really felt for them. It was the kind of game you warmed to as it went on, maybe not with a lot of good footy – though some of the crossfield long passing was quite brilliant – more because of how the Austrians picked themselves off the floor and gave it a real go. In the end the Croats’ edge in individual skill and team performance carried the day, totally exhausted as they were.

You feared even more what might happen in the late game, Germany V Poland in Klagenfürt. If you don’t know why, you have been walking around with your mind closed since the day you were born. Anticipation wasn’t helped when seventeen arrests were made the day before the game. Happily, the first fifteen minutes of the match were fraught but not ugly. And when Germany scored an overdue goal after twenty minutes it seemed mercifully to take the steam out of the game. The Poles were courageous enough without having any answer to the fluidity and strength of the tasty German midfield led by Ballack and Frings. Clearly the youngsters of Weltmeister 06 have learned and moved on to better team work, with the possible exception of Schweinsteiger and his bad barnet verging on an out of date mullet. By the end of the game the Poles had deteriorated to flakiness and were worn down to the bone chasing shadows. Ironically for nationalists it was a Polish born striker, Podolski, who scored both German goals and might have had a hat trick. Apart from ten minutes in each half Poland were carved open so easily it looked like the score could get to be embarrassing. They should have leaked a couple even before the first went in. As the match finished you had the clear impression the Germans have it in them to go all the way yet again.

Overall the first four matches were the best opening games to a Euro or World tournament for many years. They weren’t great but they were certainly mostly easy on the eye, played in the right spirit and refereed to an excellent standard. Long may it continue. If it remains a truism that the first matches are always a bit strained then maybe the best is yet to come. If so, pull up your chair, blank the pundits, and get ready to enjoy yourself. (09/06/08)

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