EURO 2008 DIARY DAY 3 : Football … 4 Cheating hysterics … 0 (Total Football nets a hat-trick)

Mafeking relieved. The ruins of Troy located. Tutankhamun’s tomb discovered; base metal turned to gold; Atlantis lost no more … I’ll stop short of “cancer cured” - that’s a bit sick - but ye get the idea: Holland have done it. Holland have found a way. The Netherlands have finally found a way. The Dutch have got it right, at last. And aren’t such discoveries always made just at the point when everyone’s written off your chances! Just when they were beginning to mourn the final passing (no pun intended) of “Total Football” the Dutch have finally discovered how to thrill AND win tournaments. “Total Football” was always a by-word for pretty, posession football and, as all us anti-footballing Rangers fans know, that’s not always how games and cups are won. Possessing the ball is one thing - ripping it right through the heart of the world champions in two coruscating end-to-end moves is quite another. From your own goal-line to the back of the opposition net in four passes - THAT is TOTAL FOOTBALL, my clog-footed, tulip-headed oranje friends. That, by Sneijder and Van Bronckhorst in Berne this evening is how to excite and triumph simultaneously. That’s how ye entertain while playing the game PROPERLY. That’s how ye combine effectiveness with aesthetics. That, that, THAAAAAT’S what IIII’m talking about!!!

Well seeing we were back in Switzerland today. With the precise timing of the most highly-tuned Cukoo clock and the kind of sweet surprise which usually drops out of a Kinder Egg, this tournament has racked up another notch on the enjoymet scale and Italy and France have just a point between them. In the Group of Death, the 2006 World Cup’s gold and silver medallists are reaching for the oxygen. What goes around, comes around. I’m not bitter about the fact France and Italy eliminated Scotland in the qualifiers. I’m bitter about how Italy eliminated Germany and France from the last World Cup! And I cannae STICK the France manager.

Just coz yer neutral, doesnae mean to say ye can’t be bitter. Just coz yer neutral, it doesn’t mean to say ye can’t be THRILLED.

It doesn’t get more “Total Football” than beating the world champions by 3 goals to 0, going on five or six goals to, well, maybe to one. The endless passing game which thrilled the world in 1974 also killed the Dutch in 1974. They wanted to pass the West Germans to death after going 1-0 up a minute into the final. Instead the Germans stuck to the secret all great teams know: You only need the ball for long enough to score. Possession is only nine-tenths of the baw. The Dutch played possession tonight, yes. But they played possession at the BACK. When they went for Italy, when they crossed that half-way line, they went for their THROATS and it was at the very moment the Italians looked most likely to score that the oranje cut them in two, three, four pieces and GOAAAAL!!!! Holland’s third was better than anythinge else we’ve seen in this tournament so far… except Holland’s second, which was better than anything we’re likely to see in the REST of this tournament.

Oh, glorious, lip-smacking, PROPER FOOTBALL - where every pass counts and every short-cut is taken. That ball from Gio to Kuyt - OOOOOH, MAMMA!!! That knock back from Kuyt to Sneijder - HUMMINAH! HUMMINAH! … and THAT FINISH From young Wesley - GOOD GORAM ALIVE, I’M IN PROPER FOOTBALL HEAVEN!!! The Dutch won the European Champonship when it was an eight-team tournament. Now they’re in a proper-sized, proper tourney of unrelenting class and quality. What they did to the World Champions, to the kings of the counter-attack this evening was the combination of skill and ruthlessness which, if they can sustain it, will see them lift the Henri Delaunay for a second time, for a BETTER time.

Italy weren’t that bad either, in the WANKDORF stadium. Amazing game. This is what happens when ex-Rangers players are involved. This is what happens when ye finally allow a team to play in this tournament wearing shirts of different colour to their shorts which are both of different colour to their socks. I loved that Romania held France to a nil-nil. I loved the way Romania defended. I loved that this group was not going the way the idiots predicted. But it’s little surprise the first goalless draw of the tournament came in yet another game featuring self-coloured strips: All-Blue against all-yellow (Shut up,Coldplay!! Your “all Yellow” is the very embodiment of bland) = poorly-performing attack against a team not interested in attack. But when ye get yer Germans in white-black-white against yer Poles - red-white-red - ye get two goals, hefty tackles, spactacle of a game. Ye get a team in with THREE DIFFERENT COLOURS for the three different parts of their strip - BANG! - ye have the game and performance of the tourney so far. I always loved the orange-black-orange combo for the Dutch but it’s amazing how a team’s performance can add lustre to their outfits, no matter how objectionable a socca-dissin’ fashionista would find it: Those pale blue socks just set it off nicely tonight. Or was it the football played in them?

Or was it that ITALY FINALLY GOT THEIR JUST DESERTS!!! YES!! Get it right fucking up yese ya sleazy, greetin-faced, hypocritical, unethical, immoral bastards!! That Rud van Nistelrooy was a mile off-side for the opening goal in Berne just made it all the sweeter. How about that for a reward for what ye did to Torsetn Frings and Zinedine Zidane in order tae win the World Cup, Ragazzi? Eh?!! How d’yese like a taste of yer gamesmanship pish now??!!

And that it was Christian Panucci - clearly off the pitch at the time - who was so wrongly judged to have played Van Nistelrooy on-side, by the same ref we had in the UEFA Cup final in Manchester, just makes it like one big, never-ending Toblerone bar of sickly sweet schadenfreude: Panucci scored that header at Hampden from the free-kick which never was and the Italians celebrated unmolested in the very kind of manner they would NEVER have allowed had Scotland done liekwise in the last minute in Rome to eliminate Italy. The way Buffon and co ran about screaming like scum in the Olympic Stadium in Berlin when Zidane responded very mildly to Materazzi’s tirade against his family and his ethnicity, tells you all we need to know on that score. Anyone else would have been embarrassed by a team-mate saying such things to an opponent - we’d have felt Materazzi deserved a butt to the FACE rather than the chest - but the Italians saw it as a means to an end. And they actually pleaded in terms of “Justice”, knowing they could get the fourth official to pretend he’d seen the incident in the flesh, when he’d actually seen it on a TV screen.

Sorry - that incident in the last World Cup final and the forenesic analysis of footage of German players defending themselves from Argentinian assaults in the quarter-final, simply to have their best player suspended before he could face Italy in the semis, is just beyond the pale. I don’t mind gamesmanship. I enjoy watching a fly bit of rule-bending. But ye have to leave SOME sport in football. Ye have to have SOME self-respect. Even when playing fives doon the Pitz, none of us wants the best guy in the other team sent off - we want to beat that team WITH HIM in it!” I used to love the Italians but in 2006 they took it too far. Fuck them.

And Holland, tonight, did just that.

I’ll give Tyldesley and pleat 6/10 for their combo behind the mike tonight. They’re a pair of blind bats - even in close-up, slow-mo replays they can’t notice blatant hand-balls and scrotum-scything assaults - but Clive’s language is animated and descriptive and he’s full of the occassion rather then any bitterness about which country is NOT at these finals.

We’ve yet to see a game wheer both teams score but tonight we saw the first game with three goals and if Holland can keep this up the Grup of Death will be the liveliest of them all. France and Italy meet in the last round of group games and today’s results ensure they will have to go for it - they will not play out a bland draw. Romania and France already did that and, while I have nothing against the French - in fact would it not be best for Scotland if France won the tournament and we could boast of beating them home and away without a goal conceded??!! - I certainly cannot stick their insecure, insensitive, insipid little manager. It’s not just because Raymond Domenech looks like a French Martn O’Neill - it’s the Ball Boys thing at Hampden. Yer in charge of the second best team in the world and ye blame ball boys for costing you all three points in a European championship qualifier. Not only was he wrong - I was at the game, SCREAMING at those over-eager little bastards to TAKE THEIR FUCKING TIME chucking the ball back to the French - but he was just unbelievably petty and ungracious to say so.

What Romania were attempting to do to France today was what Scotland DID do to France in the qualifiers and what Romania did to Holland in the qualifiers. This is the Group where everyone will meet someone they’re VERY familiar with. The French will still want a BIG STAGE revenge for the 2006 World Cup final when they meet Italy a week tomorrow. But the Romanians - always a cert for the semis - will now worry they have to face the Italian back-lash in their next match. Still, they defended so comfortably against one all-blue side that they’ll have plenty left over for the Azzurri onslaught on Friday the 13th! Comin’ at ya like a Carpathian curmudgeon, flying at ya like a twisted Transylvanian tourist! Ooh yeah!

Just as Florent Malouda sounds like an anagram of Mount Florida, so did the commentator’s phrase “Gomi in the middle” sound like a sexual invitation at tea-time this Monday. Those were the best goal-mouth moments of action in Zurich. The Letzigrund stadium looked even more beautiful than it did when I watched Celtic take a European pasting there one lovely night on the sofa. I can only assume, if it holds 30,000, that the grandstand we couldn’t see on camera, sits atop the shallow three-quarters of this stadium like the umlaut atop the “U” of Zurich - barely visible but making all the difference.

Having heard the first half hour on Radio Five Live as I drove home from work, I was stunned by the colourful, sunny scene when I switched on the TV pictures. Adidas versus Adidas was actually looking very smart on the pitch and the floodlights were, for some reason, switched on in this already sun-drenched venue. But the BBC editorial directive had already begun on the wireless. Yet again this was the worst game of football anyone had ever witnessed - nowhere near as exciting as the fact Fabio Capello can now talk English … as long as it’s not a live interview, mind! - and so I expected my sprint from steering wheel to sofa to end with the sight of black-and-white pictures of grey, grainy foreign-types playing pass-the-parcel in the rain-lashed, grass-worn centre circle of a junior ground.

But no. Instead I saw a lot of familiar faces - faces the same pundits are usually trying to tell you are the best in the world when they’re playing for Arsenal or Chelsea - playing on lush grass in bright light surrounded by yellow, blue and red-dressed fans in an architecturaly inspiring venue. And I saw a determined defence using Adrian Mutu as an out. Adrian Mutu, who suffered at the hands of an equally determined defence in last season’s UEFA cup semi-final. Whatshisface and Mark Bright were heading for 2/10 from Yours Bluely. They were so determined to be sanctimoniosuly slagging everything on show, from the French tactics - “yer a wing-ger - why don’t ye ‘ave a go??!!” - to the Romanian craftiness - “he really is too old to be picking up a booking for something like kicking the ball away”. They refused to acknowledge that quality often starts slowly in big tournaments. They refused to acknowledge that the Romanian who kicked the ball away was doing so to prevent a quick shy over his head which would have killed his team..

But they DID acknowledge that Victor Piturca, the Romanian manager, was a member of the Steau Bucharest team who won the 1986 European Cup by playing for 0-0. And they did acknowledge, most graciously and surprisingly, that this game reminded them of so many opening games featuring ENGLAND! Stone me! They get pushed up to 3/10 for that bit of sackable objectivity.

I did chortle at Domenech as he desperately applauded his team when they came off the pitch, trying to paint a picture of contenment on the face of his failure. I did guffaw at the sight of him in that stupid piped-lapels suit. I would, however, have PISSED MYSELF LAUGHING if I’d seen the incident where he stamped on a water-bottle in frustration … and then couldn’t dislodge the thing from his shoe. I didn’t see it, but I heard about it from Mark Bright in the BBC commentary team. That’s them up to 4/10.

BBC5 live has a studio anchorman and Chris Waddle as a pundit alongside TWO commmenatators who do 20 minutes at a time before swapping. Then the BEEB have whatshisname and Mark bright at the Letzigrund for the telly pictures. And then they have Lineker, Hansen, Shearer and O’Neill in the studio in Vienna. That’s quite a budget. That’s coming out my license fee. I think they’re over-doing it. And I vote they sack Lineker, Hansen and Shearer to save us all money. The EAGERNESS with which they apear un-eager about these games - so obviously because we’re all supposed to be in mourning regarding England’s absence - is simply sickening. Lineker screwed his face up at the screen when the picture cut back to him at full-time. Hansen decalred it the worst game he’d ever seen - this from a man who played for Partick Thistle! - and Shearer summoned up all the certitude he could muster to declare France had absolutely no chance of winning this trophy. I won’t exaplian WHY they’re cocks. They’ve just done it for me.

But I do want to know what UEFA have against running tracks. At the Letzigrund, the tartan tarmac was alss covered in blue matting, as per the Ernst Happel stadion yesterday in Vienna. Is Michel Platini frightened we might all see the 100M sprint lanes and think “fuck this - I’m switching off til the Olympics start”?! And why ON EARTH does the beautiful-looking Letzigrund have a STAIRWAY in the tunnel?? Thuram, Makelele and co were reminiscent of a drunk clubber in her stilettos coming doon the stairs at Victorias on Sauchiehall street as they clip-clopped their studs gingerly from dressing room to pitch. I predict a law suit!

I predict no-one will score a goal better than Holland’s second goal tonight. And that still doesn’t mean this tournament won’t keep getting better.

EURO 2008 Microphone League standings after Day 3:

Tylsdeley&Pleat - 10/20

Whatshisface&Peacok - 4/10

Whatshisface&Bright - 4/10

Motson&Bright - 3/10

Pearce&Lawrenson - 0/10