Almost Done

So the hosts are in the final and this is a good thing. Vive La France. The streets of Paris were a happy place to be last night and this has not always been the case in the last year. France are not the finished article but they’ve got some very good players and the tournaments outstanding striker so they just about deserve it. Germany may feel a bit aggrieved about the way things went last night seeing as they had most of the possession. But they created very few chances and it’s possible they wouldn’t have scored even if they were still playing.
It did occur to me that if things had worked out differently, England could’ve been playing Germany last night. In which case, I’d have been writing this blog in total misery having watched us once again lose on penalties to a team we’d pushed all the way. Sadly, England are not even good enough to get to that point nowadays.
If I’m honest, I’ve sort of had enough of the Euros. I start to feel this way quite often with major tournaments but I had high hopes for this one. I liked the twenty-four team format and the fact that it gave the lesser teams a chance of progressing to the knock-out stages. But last nights game was representative of the tournament as a whole. For the first fifteen minutes, it looked like it was going to be a great game but it never really took off.
Maybe it’s familiarity. I’ve seen a lot of big international tournaments and they always seem to tail off if your team is not involved. And my team is hardly ever involved. It’s also the fact that very little is particularly exotic anymore. I remember a time when I might have recognised a couple of players from Croatia or Portugal for example but now, I’ve seen quite a lot of them play in the Premier League or Champions League. Or perhaps it’s the abject failure of the England team. Of course we should expect exactly what happened to have happened but even still, it came as a shock didn’t it? How could we be SO shit?
I guess that’s why Iceland have been so refreshing. Aside from two of the players, I’d never heard of any of them. Maybe we need more new countries to qualify. Malta perhaps. Or Belarus. I don’t really care who. I just want some pictures of ten thousand people in a town square in a country I’ve never been to celebrating after an improbable win over a better team.
Whatever, I’ll be glad when it’s over. I’ll watch the final of course. I’ve seen most of the games and I need completion. It would be like spending forty hours on a two thousand piece jigsaw and then not putting the final piece in. I hope France stuff Portugal but then aside from people who are actually Portuguese, so do most people.