The Archive

Too many papers and websites were interested in everything but the teams actually playing at Euro 2008, Ian Plenderleith discovers

England may not have played any football at Euro 2008, but their representatives did them proud. The members of the media who travelled to Austria and Switzerland could not get England off their minds. The Independent’s Nick Townsend was so taken with the Germany v Portugal quarter-final that he wondered if there was “anyone sitting at home seriously bemoaning the fact that Becks and the boys were not there to enliven things”. Fuelled by the fresh Alpine air, he mused on how the atmosphere might have been sullied by England travelling “as always, not in hope but in a heady atmosphere of lager-fuelled, St George flag-strewn expectation”.

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It hasn't been a great tournament for the host teams, writes Graham Dunbar

Switzerland travelled for six-and-a-half hope-filled years towards Euro 2008. Then it was gone in five days. The first country to play, the first to lose, the first to be knocked out. In a country whose real sporting passions are ice hockey, skiing and tennis, there were many face-painted converts to football left wondering if Switzerland was better off without the tournament.

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It wasn't a great tournament for Austria, writes Paul Joyce

The author Thomas Bernhard once remarked that the typical Austrian always distances himself from his country. By the start of Euro 2008, however, this distance had given way to a morbidly self-ironic fatalism. As the national side plummeted to 101st in the FIFA rankings, thousands of fans signed an online petition demanding Austria’s withdrawal from the tournament for crimes against “aesthetic beauty”. Spoof Euro 2008 T-shirts and Y-fronts bearing the motto Zu Gast bei Verlierern (A Guest of the Losers) sold like hot cakes.

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Greece did as badly at Euro 2008 as many had predicted they would four years earlier. But despite his champions' poor performance, the knives are not out for Otto Rehhagel, as Paul Pomonis explains

You can safely recognise a team in deep trouble, the moment their coach turns to the supernatural for assistance. “Boys, pray for us,” Otto Rehhagel asked the Greek press before the crucial match against Russia. Unfortunately, no amount of divine intervention could save the Greece team this summer. To the surprise of many, their defence of their 2004 European title ended in abject failure, one that brought back memories of the legendary fiasco at the USA 94 World Cup.

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With no home nation to cheer on, we could have been spared the usual jingoism. But to Taylor Parkes's fury, the BBC and especially ITV missed no opportunity to scrape a reference to good old Blighty

As the most promising international tournament for years got under way, the pundits tried to look on the bright side. “When your own teams are in it,” suggested Andy Townsend, “you don’t really watch the other teams.” Well, anyone who remembers the TV coverage of the last World Cup can vouch for that. So did this mean England’s absence from Euro 2008 would spare us that obsessive Anglocentricism which makes international football on British TV so uniquely aggravating, such an insult to the intelligence (not to mention the Scots, Irish and Welsh)? Hardly. It just meant our patriotic pundits had to try a little harder.

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