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.
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”.
Euro 2008 was a success on the pitch, but off it, the quality of the media coverage was poor and appears stuck in the past
Euro 2008 will be remembered fondly, not just in Spain. There was a lot of good football as a series of teams discovered the virtues of positive play over cautiousness, and there was some glorious drama. Russia disappointed in the end, but were deserved semi-finalists. Turkey’s progress to the same stage was more remarkable; they ran out of luck while putting in their best performance, against Germany, but that 3-2 defeat was the most memorable of a series of fine games.
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The title race was over by Christmas, but in the end it wasn't that bad a season in League Two, writes Ron Hamilton
Over recent seasons it has become an increasingly popular pastime for League Two aficionados to point and sneer at the lopsided and avaricious Premier League, scoffing at the hype and hoopla in comparison to the somewhat earthier charms of football’s basement division. Yet while much of this scorn is predicated on the assumption that the lower leagues represent the last vestiges of football’s soul, the 2007-08 season has seen the fourth division’s occupation of the moral high ground somewhat undermined.