EURO 2008 DIARY DAY 1: BBC … 0 ITV … 2 (UEFA sent off after two minutes)

Shock! Horror! Man! Can ye believe it? The host nation loses the opening game of a major tournament for the first time since … erm, since the last European Championships .. and for the last time until … erm … well, until Croatia turn Austria over in Vienna this evening. The strips were shit, the commentators were shitter and both channels rely on classical music to make their title sequences “The sound-track of that summer of football”. Yawn, yawn and zzzzzzzzzzzz. Is it just my age? Or is it the fact I today completed the bagging of 99 grounds with the vicarious blood-letting of Clydebank v Maybole Juniors in the dark, deadly depths of dainty Duntocher? Whatever it was, ten minutes after arriving back from 90 minutes of non-league Scottish fitbaw, I began experiencing an unsettling inversion phenomenon with the watching of live international fussball on the box: Opening ceremony better than expected - actual fitbaw action a bit anemic.

From Basle it was Puma versus Puma, all-white v all-red. From Geneva it was Nike v Nike, all-white v all-old red. The cuts of the shirtsand the pipings on the strips this year are so untidy it’s little wonder Yves St Laurent just snuffed it. The only more horrible sartorial faux pas on view was Figo, in the stands, wearing a dress jacket with a T-Shirt! No, Luis - NO!! You’re not Usher, mate. You’re retired - act like it. Turkey were wearing GREECE strips for fuck’s sake. White with a light-blue trim? I’d have been less stunned to see Rangers in green and white hoops. Does no-one CARE anymore??!!

Just as at the city of Manchester Stadium, when we had to surrender our home coloured shorts and socks, UEFA want team uniforms as anemic as the stadia and the crowds. Suddenly the games themselves, the matches, seem more bland, too packaged, like an over-tightly sealed Kinder Egg with the suprise in real danger of not getting out. Only one stadium in this tournament holds as many as 50,000 people. Another holds 42,000. One holds 32,000 and the remaining FIVE hold 30,000 people exactly. Switzerland borders France, Italy and Germany as well as its co-host. Thsi tournament in central fucking Europe! This tournament is accesible in a day for millions of would-be travelling fans of 90% of the competing teams. Build eight x 60,000-capacity stadiums and they’d still have been sold out for every game. And yet UEFA don’t want crowds there for anything other than TV scenery and background noise. IS the life being sucked out these tournaments to the point where even a rabid anorak like myself is becoming a bit bored by it all?

The same advertising hoardings arounf thr pitch-side. Same names - Hyundai, Carlsberg, JVC, Adidas, Matsrcard, Cannon, McDonalds, Cocoa Cola, Continental - the same height and length of advertising board and yet , one of those adverts is “Say no to Racism” and another asks us to “Respect” our opponents. That’s it - ethics and morals reduced to the same importance as buying the right beer, car or camera … or the right credit card. Fair dues. This is globalisation after all: Every country has a Brazilian in their squad, even at the European Championships. Every country has a variation on the same strip. Every Squad has a Premiership presence. Happiness, they say, writes white. Contentment makes for absolutely no drama. And so the theatre is being sucked out our game because the world is becoming smaller and petty nationalism is, thank fuck, dying.

The flags of each nation are nothing more than logos for what are effectivley family-run private companies or public-owned industries: It doesn’t matter how often Martin O’Neill tries to reunite Slovakia and the Czech Republic, he can’t change the flags: The old monarchies have eagles, chevrons, dragons, lions and shields on their corporate logos: The new republics have functionalist, minimalist knots and crosses. Ye need a jingle? National anthems will alwayd be just catchy enough to keep the customers subscribing to the ten-a-penny patriotsim product. There’s a tired “HOPP SCHWIIZ, HOPP SCHWIIZ” from three sides of thw stadium and the other two-syllable rejoinder I first heard from up the other end at Wembley twelve years ago - “Czech-i! Czech-i!” (sic?) made it all seem like two gobal conglomerates giving only the vaguest impression of competition … just enough to stop the monopilies and mergers commission having a word with Monsieur Platini and the suits who elected him to run the corporation of corporations.

I caught just the last ten minutes of Football Focus today. Already the Anglo-centric, Lowest Common Denominator angle has kicked in. Basically, it’s a shit tournament because there’s no-one going mental in the streets of either country and because it’s rigged in Germany’s favour. Hansen subtly introduced the word “again” when the latter point was raised again this evening, just to keep his job for the next year. If Germany ever had an easy draw before, Al, they MADE it “easy” by being good and they were bound to get one eventually seeing as how they CONSISTENTLY QUALIFY FOR EVERYTHING ALWAYS!!! Dick. The former point, however, has some credence. There may be a lack of down-at-heel raw emotion on display in Stephensplatz and teh RIngstrasse but that’s because these host nations are rich and comfortably anonymous. I’ve been on holiday in Austria, in Vienna. I’ve done the day trip to Salzburg from Munich too. These people are business people - they excell at tennis and skiiing because that’s the kind of shit business folk do on a weekend. They spend all week running stuff, they don’t want to have to rely on team-mates or - even worse - a team of 11 guys they’ve never met, providing them with their weekend sporting enjoyment. No. These are self-made people working in very clever countries. They cycle, swim, climb, ski, sail and jog, jog, jog. Football is loved in these two countries - but it aint god. Welcome to the first ever Middle Class European Championships.

A guy called Servet was playing for Turkey at Servette’s stadium. In Geneva there was a pitch-side advert for Kia Motors which wasn’t pitch-side in Basel. We saw Ujfalusi of The Czech Republic and Ludovic Mangnin of Switzerland at Ibrox last season in European action. Niether came away from Ibrox with a win. Nuno Gomes must have a portrait of his rotting, decaying self locked away in an attic in Lisbon. He must have owned it for the last fifteen years at least. Martin O’Neill couldn’t remember that Czechoslovakia didn’t exist anymore and Gordon Strachan was standing pitch-side in the St Jakob’s stadium - while at Celtic, Strachan lost a Champions League qualifier in Slovakia and O’Neill lost a Champions League qualifier in St Jakob’s. The Swiss coach looks like Jack Lemmon.

That stuff was the kind of drivel which I was finding more interesting than the games themselves tonight. Frankly, I was AT the last opening game of a major tournament (I had to get that in sometime, didn’t I?! In fact, while yer here - did ye know I was also AT the last Euro Finals clash between Turkey and Portgal, at the City Ground, Nottingham in 1996) and maybe that’s what swung it for me: Maybe the catharsis or the metamorphosis or whatever took place as I drank, sang and gawped through the 2006 World Cup opening ceremony in Munich’s Allianz Arena, generally ignoring all the shit going on before the game started and blew all our minds, demanded that I experience the opposite order of emotions today.

2006: Opening ceremony as boring as expected - actual fitbaw action better than expected.

2008: Opening ceremony better than expected - actual fitbaw action a bit anemic.

Today, I found the opening ceremony more interesting than the opening game. Maybe it was Motty’s continual inability to hide his typical old man addiction to big boobs. It was hilarious and disturbing all at once. When the snow queens descended from the St Jakob’s grandstands to pour the white stuff over the Alps on the centre circle, close-ups revealed that one of the silvery fairy monarchs had a cleavage of almost Alpine proportions. Motty giggled and commented on the “lovely dress” she was wearing. He couldn’t have cared less about the opening ceremony up until that point. He’d come across like Terry Wogan during the Eurovision song contest. Suddenly, though, he was interested, and it was patently clear he was enjoying the peaks, troughs and undulations on view thanks to the cut and occupant of that particular dress rather then the tailoring involved.

Next thing we know, Miss Switzerland is stood in front of the Main Stand, waving amiably in a tight-fitting get-up. Motty and his side-kick had already stumbled into co-commentary by announcing just how close they were sat to the pitch. Mark Bright clearly had some other pundit or journo on top of him when Moitty asked him for his opening salvo of the tournament. Bright’s initial words, after a distracted guffaw, were to let us all know the BBC pairing were just 15 yards from the track. As Miss Switzerland stood in front of them, her own pairing looking particularly uncomfortable and prominent, Motty’s own pitch went a bit higher as he insisted he could ” - heh-heh - almost reach out and touch the, erm, “volunteers” “. All this after he’d nudge-winkingly assured us the stunt herdsmen on stilts were more interested in the milk maids than the cows.

Five sexual assaults on women in Glasgow on Thursday evening. Smashing, Motty. Nice. Keep up the government-sanctioned objectification why don’t you.

When coverage was scheduled to begin just half an hour before kick-off I assumed this to be a sign-posting of the Beeb’s indifference to a tournament not featuring England. Most opening ceremonies take something close to three hours. As the programme began at 4:30 for a 5pm Kick-off, I awaited live pictures of the last trapeze artists, inflatable cows and gigantic hula-hoops being removed from the pitch. But no. The opening ceremony took precisely quarter of an hour and was seriously fucking cute and jolly and imaginative. The snow queens WERE beautiful, the stilted milk maids WERE gorgeous and Miss Switzerland IS a stunning looking woman but they all added up to a semi-decent piece of theatre. Hardly agit-prop but certainly not the sleazy pole-dance the venerable John Motson wanted us to share with him.

The Referee furtively yet appropriatey scratched his, erm, “Toblerone bar” on camera, in the tunnel, and next thing we knew the teams were on the pitch. Libor Sionko - mmm - still cannae make my mind up but he was definitely worth a go. That I wasn’t really captivated by anything other than the wider issues as Switzerland and the Czechs searched for the one goal which was clearly gonnae win this game didn’t mean I wasn’t worried about Kobi Kun’s comatose wife or utterly gutted for Alexander Frei when he was taken down the trackside in tears, his tournament clearly over. But Lineker wasn’t affected. Gary Lineker has NO emotion, unless oozing satanic evil and encouraging borderline racism and full-on xenophobia can be described as emotions. He had his sarcasm script all worked out - “Huh - that was pish coz England aren’t playing and the only inetesting stiff in that 45 minutes were the tattoos on some of the players … because they aren’t English.” Insensitive, crass, unprofessional. And an opportunity missed.

Why don’t they gamble, the BBC? Why don’t the take a chance and actually try to sell us genuine football love rather than lazy neo-patriotism? Mmm? Why don’t they react with interest to what’s happening rather than with bitterness and huffiness to what HASN’T happened? Alex Frei, the captain and talisman of the host nation, has just been injured and even if you’re cynical, the sheer theatre of seeing a player disintegrate into tears of despiar live on telly HAS TO BE WORTH A COMMENT, Lineker!! Shoddy, tired, offensive. The BBC studio is so bad I actually found myself backing O’Neill against Lineker, Shearer and Hansen.

The football wasn’t up to much but, as you can see, I was pretty excited and interested by the early exchanges of the ITV-BBC derby clash. The first guys to touch the ball and get involved in this biannual dust-up were familair faces and their differing styles made for a blistering salvo of opening tackles. The spine of the ITV team - Smith, Neville and Townsend - won early control the game for “The Independants”. But most players were off to a bad start and there was little or no tempo or pattern to the play:

Moston gets excited at the wrong times - “MAGNIN’S PUT THE BALL DOWN FOR A CORNER AND HE’S GESTURING TO THE CROWD TO RAISE THE NOISE!!! OH MY GOOOOD, HE’S LIKE NEIL ARMSTRONG LANDING ON THE …!!!” … “Vonlanthen’s just hit the, erm, post thingy with that white, round object, apparently, and I really do wonder if the wife’s taped last night’s Big Brother …” - and Mark Bright is a lovely, affable chap but needs to start watching his monitor rather than the pitch in front of him coz he didn’t get one call right all night, until he saw the action replays and corrected himself: “He’s a mile offside and … oh no, sorry - the active player, the guy who, erm, actually who scored the goal, erm, wasn’t offisde”. Three out of ten for that pair. Tyldseley and Pleat simply spent the whole of Turkey-Portugal openly wanking over the very presence of Ronaldo while also prepping the tone with themes of betrayal ready for the back-lash when Portugal’s thrid or fourth-most effective player leaves Old Trafford for the Bernabeu. Four out of ten for them.

Both channels opted for the Mozart angle on the opening title sequence. ITV went straight for the music itself while the BBC suffused the graphics with the whole opera feel. This is the way it will always be after Nessun Dorma did the biz in 1990. One of you should have gone for some honest rock or indie music, guys. Plus ca change! The BBC nicked it with a classier Proscenium Arch animation and a genuine rendition of Wolfgang Amadeus. ITV went straight into the sheet music iconography and almost equalised by including an image of Gerdy Muller, DER BOMBER DIE NATION, celebrating his winner in the 1972 final, but destroyed the highlight of the Magic Flute by grinding it through the Lads’ mag anti-talent that is Natasha Marsh, as much a Soprano as Pavarotti was a goalie.

Trompe-l’œil v Treble Clefs and BBC won but the couch on channel three was better. Andy Townsend is still a hero of mine from ITV4’s coverage of our Sporting Lisbon and Fiorentina games last season. And although Gary Neville is a humourless ugly scruff, he doesn’t give the rabid ENG-ER-LUND punters what they want to hear like wot Hansen and co do. He doesn’t even give classy anchorman Matt Smith what he wants to hear. Neville says England aren’t there because they aren’t good enough - simple as. And When he’s told this is the tournament where all the managers will have their cheque books out he doesn’t go along with the pleasantries - “No, all the best managers never buy at a tournament - they’ll already have their signing targets picked out”. Straight-faced, straight-talking, no agenda. Superb.

The attempts to connect with Craig Doyle live in the Portugese parts of London were typical ITV - pure variety, and shit - but at least they were havin’ a go at acknowledging the fact lots of people don’t give a fuck if England are at this tournament or not.

BBC told us Vaclav Sverkos was lucky to score the only goal of the game in Basle because it came off his shin. Bullshit. It came off his shin because he was tackled by a desperate Swiss defender whom he’d left for dead. If Sverkos - who came on for the Jonah Lomuh of the soccer world, Jan Koller - hadn’t made that run and set up his shot then that defender would not have put the ball onto his shin. Not lucky - down to hard work and skill. If it hadn’t come off his shin he would have connected even more sweetly with the ball and probably still scored. Lucky fuck-all!

The Czechs probably have the best badge on any strip at the tournament but I cannot wait to see Germany and Croatia tomorrow/tonight (I’m typing through midnight), breaking up the plain-shirt and self-coloured strip show we watched tonight. The “Hopp Schwiiz” chant sounds disturbingly like “Auschwitz! Auschwitz!” and, of course, a meeting of Germany and Poland conjures up plenty horrific memories when extrapolated into wider historical events, but the Group B FOOTBALL MATCHES this Sunday will actually break the tournament out of a strange aesthetic form of fascism which we watched tonight (WHAT??!!*).

Portugal began to break down the tactical and stylistic conformity of the day with their final flurry against the Turks but Vienna and Klagenfurt will provide different-shaped stadiums and alternative makes and styles of strip. Never mind cool medieval BADGES - get yer country’s FLAG emblazoned across yer WHOLE BODY!! I can’t break free from ITV and BBC but the players have the power to bring us out of the sameness of it all and restore our faith in the game. Give us good strips and good football. From there, perhaps, the TV coverage will follow.

Because, for the next three weeks I will have no curvacious babe-infested pre-match entertainment to pick me up for these games. RIght, Motty?!! Nudge-nudge! In fact - wait a minute - is that not what the problem was? The opening ceremony DISTRACTED me from the games tonight. It didn’t pick me up but rather sat me down flat. “globalisation”?? Sameyness”??!! Did I not just mention teh holocaust and teh second world war?? An dthat’s just GERMANy V POLAND!!! Portugal v Turkey was an all-catholic conuntry still recovering from a dictatorship versus an Islamic country trying to fight off burgeoning fundamentalism. Czech sv Swiss is a fromer Communist country whcih used to be attached to another nation versus teh world’s most neutral country whcih speaks three different languages and none of them is called “Swiss”!! And, as for Croatia - well we all know ehere they’re from …!!!

*Yeah. Erm, I think I’ve found the root of my problem today.I can’t concentrate on the football because it’s all too much right now. There’s too much going on at once when a new tournament starts. The football - the game itself is the one thing I understand best and am most comfy with so that’s the thing I can ignore while my brain tries to work its way round all the other new stuff going on. I’m just finding my bearings, that’s all. I need to spend the first day of a tournament getting myself comfy within the format and atmosphere of the TV channels which’ll be presenting the tournament to me. Then I need the second day to get my head round all the socio-religio-economico-politico differences within all the competing nations and within each first round group. And then there’s the strips to sort out, and then the new refereeing directives … and the weather … and I need to see ALL the stadiums too … THEN I’ll be settled enough to concentrate on the fitbaw. Aye - that’s it - I’m just settling in, like the cranky old man I am. I’m slagging the relatives who haven’t visited in a while but I’m happy to see them really. I’m just getting my bearings. Give me til Wednesday - I’l be ready to talk fitbaw by Wednesday.

It’s not that it’s unexciting - it’s that it’s all too much to digest!! Or is it that I had too much full-on, in-yer-face, in-yer-HEART genuine excitement all through 2007/2008 to have any emotion left?

As Jayzee would say “Ah got niney nine stadiums but your pitch ain’t one!”