Juventus winger on as a substitute pierces dense fog of attrition with a goal to bring the Azzuri’s Euros back to lifeThere was no sense of inevitability as the ball landed at Federico Chiesa’s feet. No real feeling of grace. An agonising, attritional 95 minutes of football had seen to all that. Like tired boxers in a 13th round, Italy and Austria were simply circling each other, waiting to see whose legs gave way first. The awkward high bounce, forcing Chiesa to control the ball with his head to prevent it from going out of play, simply reinforced the notion of a game in which nothing had worked and nothing would work.And then in a shuffle and a swing of...
How to counter Joshua Kimmich and Robin Gosens is one of a string of conundrums the England manager must solveNothing in football is ever straightforward. There are few rights and few wrongs; almost everything is contingent. But even within that context, England’s game against Germany on Tuesday is hard to pin down. There are few certainties for either side; rather this is two swarms of questions buzzing into each other.At least with Germany, there is relative certainty about the shape. Joachim Löw has vacillated between a back three and a back four since the World Cup debacle before finally settling on a 3-4-3, in which the real strength is the attacking prowess of the wing-backs, Joshua Kimmich and Robin Gosens....
BBC panel set a sensitive standard early on and analysts ranging from Alex Scott to Robbie Savage have had a good Euro 2020While it has fielded almost 6,500 complaints for the intrusive nature of its coverage of the successful attempts to resuscitate Christian Eriksen following his collapse during Denmark’s opening Euro 2020 match against Finland, on reflection the BBC’s coverage of what might have been a tragedy seemed touchingly deft.In its subsequent apology to those upset by images of the stricken player receiving medical attention, the national broadcaster pointed out it had no control over coverage provided by Uefa as host broadcaster and claimed it had taken its coverage off air “as quickly as possible” once the match had been...
For all their excellence, the legacy of the ageing world No 1 team boils down to the next two weeks, starting against PortugalThere is a moment towards the end of the recent BBC documentary Whistle to Whistle in which, after an hour of fixating on the details and minutiae of his job as Belgium coach, Roberto Martínez finally allows himself to take a broader view. “I just feel that this generation deserves silverware,” he says. “They deserve something that will be talked about for the next 50, 60, 70 years. But that doesn’t mean it’s going to happen.”In those few sentences, Martínez expresses the fundamental paradox of his job, in many ways the fundamental paradox of international football. Since taking...
Our national team is a minor cast member on European stage, and militaristic jingoism is only damaging to ourselves“ACHTUNG! SURRENDER.” The Daily Mirror’s front page on the morning of England v Germany at Euro 96, the last big Wembley occasion a bit like the next big Wembley occasion, made a huge impression at the time.And not because it was particularly inane or stupid, although it was also those things, but because people liked it. It was (kind of) funny in canned-laughter sort of way. Mainly, it said all the things. Related: Lothar Matthäus: ‘We’re favourites if England v Germany goes to penalties’ | Ed Aarons Related: Denmark and rainbow-lit stadiums have shown the way forward on inclusion | Philip Lahm...