The Archive

Daunis Auers was among the Latvia fans following their team of outsiders around Portugal. They might have even stayed a little longer but for a crucial decision by an English referee…

Euro 2004 arrived suddenly and unexpectedly in Latvia. About two weeks before the tournament, the local media began running stories on the national team. They followed the training regime of the players, reported on their choice of cars (Simon Jordan will be pained to hear that the two ex-Crystal Palace players had the nicest ones) and even ran features on the players’ wives.

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In the first of a series of articles looking at how the tournament was received at home, Al Needham strokes his chin, sifts through the discarded plastic flagpoles and wonders where all those crosses of St George came from. And does it mean anything anyway?

It’s good for a country and its people to take stock and re-evaluate its sense of identity every now and then, and I did just that in a bus shelter last month, sitting next to an elderly Jamaican woman, watching the endless procession of cars with plastic white flags with red crosses clipped to their windows. Where had they come from? It wasn’t this bad in 2002. Had a giant sandcastle firm been made bankrupt, or something? Was it just a local thing? And what did it all mean? “Look at these fools,” said the Jamaican woman, all of a sudden. “They don’t know what it means to be patriotic. In Jamaica, we have the flag up all year round, not for some… pussyclaat football game.” Then she sucked her teeth. For a very long time.

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Smart-casual wear and laid-back pallyness proliferated on both channels during Euro 2004, even if expert analysis did not. But, says Cameron Carter, the pundits' humour was no worse than Skinner and Baddiel's

 I t started tensely and just got worse. Before the Portugal v Greece game many of us were troubled by Dull Host Anxiety – you may yourself have experienced this on hearing the voice of Norah Jones wafting earward as you pull off your mittens outside the neighbours’ door. I sat there on day one fearing that in the opening ceremony Portugal would be reduced to a demonstration of the port bottling process by a giant Eusébio doll, aided by Lisbon schoolchildren holding dining-table-shaped balloons. So it was with some relief that I learned Portugal had in fact discovered the world and taught it how to exist. To add colour to the nautical scene, several hundred citizens dressed as orange sperm arranged themselves into a representation of a giant football, a spectacle only partly diminished by a shot of two of the sperm clearly chatting about their costumes on their miraculous journey to the ball-womb.

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The World Cup has had to expand to the point where it can be too much of a good thing, believes Philip Cornwall, who thinks the European Championship is now perfection

It’s part of the calendar of the football fan’s life. One summer is dominated by the World Cup; then there’s a quiet year; but now the European Champ­ionship circus rolls in, in many ways a less cumbersome, more accessible (closer if you want to go; always in our time zone if you don’t) and so more perfect tournament than the global event. Euro 2004 offers a steady stream of daily matches stretching for a fortnight, then a less intense but more important final week, finishing on a Fourth of July that will be cele­brated so wildly in one country that visiting Americans will complain about the fireworks. The tournament’s rise, creating a two-rather than four-year cycle, has ensured the eclipse of the international friendly, making them training grounds for the games that truly decide coach’s jobs.

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Reading fan Roger Titford is worried by the state of the Nationwide as the Premiership fulls further clear

Pre-season favourites West Ham were always going to be the big story in this league, whatever they did. One of the top dozen clubs in the country (in theory) slumming it in the Nationwide; would it be ruin or revival? From a distance it sounded like a catalogue of disasters: the Rotherham dressing room; Glenn Roeder’s exit; the ruck with Reading over Alan Pardew’s contract; his failure to get a win for ages; losing a 3-0 lead to West Brom; backroom staff shown the door; Jermain Defoe collecting red cards like they were Monopoly properties before following David James out of the club; fans booing awful home performances; dismal dis­plays in key away games; the board under pressure from shareholders. And yet like a real EastEnders script they kept it going to the last moments of the season.

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