Andy Brassell looks at the fallout in Portugal four years after they hosted the European Championship

Fans may complain that the Swiss and Austrian stadiums to be used in Euro 2008 may be a little on the small side, with only those in Basel and Vienna having room for significantly more than 30,000 spectators. And you can imagine by how much those dissenting voices would have been amplified had England, or indeed any of the home nations, managed to qualify for the finals. However, there is at least little doubt over the sustainability of the grounds post-tournament.

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Cameron Carter revisits The Big Match

Nostalgia is such a beautiful, furry thing that even the mundane and irksome, when viewed from the impossible distance of the future, can bring forth the smile of regret. Many years after the first sacking of Rome, and some time before the final collapse, there were probably some older citizens who became wistful about how one didn’t hear much about Visigoths these days. That is how it is with The Big Match Revisited (Thursdays, 4pm, ITV4), hidden away in the netherworld of daytime digital TV.

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Everyone has a novel inside them, the cliche says, while failing to point out that most of them would be unreadable. A similar principle appears to apply to football podcasts and, as they are easier to produce than books, there are a lot of awful ones out there, though Ian Plenderleith does find a few worth a listen

 Are podcasts an important part of the brave New Media era, or just blogs with sound? I’m not that good with new stuff. I abandoned vinyl as late as was decently possible, and took a while to catch on to the idea of downloading music and having songs on your hard drive instead of on your shelf. Until a couple of years ago, I didn’t see what broadband could do for me that wasn’t already available through my dial-up connection. And neither had I listened to a single podcast, even though the concept had been nagging me unpleasantly for a while. As in: “I suppose I ought to listen to one some time.”

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Spectacle takes precedence over players

The broken leg suffered by Eduardo three minutes into Arsenal’s match at Birmingham prompted a swift and furious reaction, with Arsène Wenger’s call for a life ban for Eduardo’s assailant Martin Taylor, which he retracted a few hours later. However, Wenger’s request for analysis of the real problems in the game and concern that “if the newspapers all want to talk about [William] Gallas then Taylor will get away with it” was largely ignored in coverage of the incident.

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Press reaction to the crazy proposal

The press was almost united in its opposition to the Game 39 plan. The Daily Express started up a sports page “crusade” called “Kick Out The 39th Step”, endorsed by Johan Cruyff and Graham Taylor among others. The Daily Mail took a proprietorial tone, claiming to have “led opposition to Scudamore’s campaign” via its online petition entitled “Just Say No!”, while the Sun settled on the annoyingly Cockernee “He Hasn’t Got A Scuby”, represented by Richard Scudamore’s head grafted on to Scooby Doo’s body. But while the Sun’s sports pages fell in line with the prevailing mood, their news section had taken an entirely different approach on February 8, the day after the scheme was announced.

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