At this time in the football calendar, the world is full of 'content creators' trying to ride the gravy train by getting on board the Euro Fever express (all the way to Engagement Central via Smash that Like Button and Subscribe Parkway.) Their pathetic attempts to harness the occasion is only matched by their audiences acceptance of the bland and ill informed drivel they churn out.
As someone whose knowledge of top level football these days extends to watching Match of the Day once every six months and accidentally seeing a goal now and again on Twitter or in the pub, it would be absurd of me to attempt to pose as some kind of authority on the Euros. What kind of twat would not know anything about the thing they were writing about and yet, write about it anyway?
Ladies and Gentlemen. I give you the official MCLF Euros preview blog.
As your guide to the forthcoming tournament, I'm going to share a range of things to look out for. Think of this as a metaphorical bingo card to carry with you.
1) There will be a player that runs a bit weirdly so instinctively you'll think he's shite but will turn out to be absolutely fucking brilliant. He won't be English.
2) There also will be a different player who is ridiculously slow but who is also absolutely brilliant. He also won't be English. I'll really envy the nation (probably Italy or Croatia) who have this player and will, at any given moment launch into a monologue about 'what this shows is how the English game, as much as it's evolved is still essentially in thrall to an idea of physical attributes being superior to technical skills and (insert name of player who is slow as fuck but incredible) shows how that just isn't true. If he was English he wouldn't get a game for us in a million years but look at how good he is'
The person listening won't give a fuck and will say 'mmm' in reply if I'm lucky.
3) Someone (an East European nation or Scotland - which is essentially the same thing) will have picked a really massive lad up front in the hope that works. It will work once in the group stages but never again. On the same note, there'll be a point where, no matter what sort of football hipster you might be you'll wish England had picked Andy Carroll just for that last 10 minutes as they bring on ever more identikit exciting attacking midfielders but there's no one to hold the bloody ball up for them. Get Madine on!
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4) People pretending they know all about every league in Europe cos they've sneakily looked up the figures as they haven't actually watched any of it but behave as if they have will be annoying as fuck on Twitter and that.
"Carlos deMaris, is the MASTER of the half press and his rotating demi 10 role was the KEY this season for Real Betis"5) Jordan Pickford will take most of my attention when England play because without Grealish he's the most watchable player. His restless manic battle with his own concentration and wholehearted delight when he gets to do *anything at all* is a delight of the modern age. His goal kicking is high art.
6) At some point there'll be a highlights reel and Dele Alli will be on it and you'll think 'there's a shame - wonder where he is now?"
7) I'll tell anyone willing to listen "Adam Wharton? Yeah, I was actually at his debut..." as if that gives me some kind of insight into his career way above people who've actually watched him play loads but only on the telly.
Having checked what I thought about his debut, it turns out I didn't think about him at all and the only thought I offered on t'Rovers was
Their manager looks like a boring golf club pro. He looks like the kind of man who says 'I love camping!' but owns a camper van not a tent and has all his things ironed and laid out when he goes what he calls 'camping' but is really 'driving a big luxury van house to a field'. He definitely has a gas barbecue that's really clean.
Which is probably a fairly useful guide to the standard of informed content you can expect from this blog regarding the Euros.
8) Scotland will be awful, a bit better and then actually quite good when it's too late. Either that or they'll be great in the games they can't win and rubbish in the games they can. I will insist that Lawrence Shankland is pure world class despite him not actually being so.
9) Slavan Bilic will be the best pundit and if he's not there I might watch YouTube clips of him being and odd mixture of really intense and strangely dismissive during half time and that will mean he'll still be the best pundit in my head.
10) The whole thing will take what is awful about large scale international tournaments (the global brands covering absolutely everything with logos, the weird atmosphere that comes from stands full of executives and corporate friends of UEFA, the relentless management of every second of build up and post match via music and so on and so on) to a new level
11) You'll want to hate it, but despite it being objectively awful and leaving you yearning for the good old days of shit grounds, a riot and Barry Davies, you'll fall in love with it anyway, because it's football and football is tremendous and no matter what they do around the edges, international football retains something kind of pure about it because you can't buy the other teams best players and that, in an age where in domestic football, a player like Grealish can be bought by a state to gift to their insane Spanish football scientist purely for him to perform bizarre experiments on, is something kind of beautiful. You have to use what you have. There is no way to buy anyone. The end.
12) There'll be a sense that *something is happening that isn't a war, a pandemic, a recession, the slow death of democracy or owt like that* - that will be great because it'll be right there and everywhere and almost everyone will be part of it and even if, like me, you don't actually have a clue, you'll be confidently saying things like 'yes, but that's Mainoo's game and we should exploit that not restrict it' or 'you've got to balance the fact Stones won't just sit in don't you?'
13) At some point, you'll realise you are totally immersed in it and it will feel like it will never end. Just as you notice that, you'll realise there's only a few group games to go and then, it will all suddenly seem to speed up, there'll be less and less and less, like a piece of paper being folded over and over and over, getting smaller and smaller and smaller and then... It'll be gone and you'll feel empty. England almost certainly won't have won. The clock will have ticked over and when the final final whistle blows another two years will have passed in the time it takes for that shrill blast to sound.
We mark our lives by these things. We work out what year it was by thinking about what happened that summer. Did Gazza cry? Was it when Van Basten swiveled on that volley? Were the Soviet Union in it or was it Russia? Did we fuck up spectacularly against Iceland? Was it the USA? Was it the summer that Tricky Trev got picked by accident and was actually really good? Did Rooney twat one? Was it pre/post Sven? Did we like or loathe Maguire at that point? What pub were you in? Did you watch it on your phone? Who did you hug in the joyful chaos that came before the perennial disappointment?
Odd years are marked by whether they came before or after even ones.
The first Euros I can remember was Jack Charlton and Ireland. England, failing in grinding it out and falling way short. Ruud Gullit and the Dutch being way better than everyone else. There were only 8 teams and yet, sitting as it does in my childhood memory, it seemed to be impossibly rich and to have lasted for months.
Now I am older, the tournament has about 800 teams and will last 4 times as long, the standard of football will be palpably better in almost every way, the coverage infinitely deeper and the clarity of the TV picture spectacularly sharper.
Somehow, the former will always seem more deep than the latter. Nothing will ever be as visceral as the the things in the past that shaped what we became.
I don't want to miss a kick though. I will, because I'm a person with a job who has to do things other than watch football sometimes.
I resent that hugely. I want to sit and watch the meaningless end of group games between minor European nations, one of whom has a player who used to play for Derby and the other, a bloke who is in the reserves at Bournemouth. I want to have nothing in my life other than this. The childhood freedom of nothing to do other than occasionally tidy your room and scribble the scores on a wall chart. I want to develop strong opinions on Albania or to be right there when Serbia make that substitute and things turn in the way I was when I was 10. I want to badly spell the names of exotic goalscorers in felt tip on shiny paper. Fuck, I want to go to the field and twat a ball against the wall and see myself in my minds eye playing the game I've just watched. Time is cruel. Growing up is overrated.
I could be cynical. I could write reams about UEFA and corruption and the cold dead hand of television, of global capital and free market ideals strangling the life out of the game. I could do that in a heartbeat and it would probably be better informed and more worthy than this shite I'm churning out right now but underneath all the sideshow hoopla, there is football.
For all that the fuss around the tournament will inevitably resemble one of those mad Amazon packages where you order a thing that arrives in a box 10 times it's size that contains enough bubble wrap to fill a medium sized sea with micro plastics, ultimately, in the midst of it, at the heart of the thing, at the epicentre of our days and our lives, there will be football.
I love football. We all do. It's the best game anyone has ever come up with.
Love is all there is. Love and death. So, before we die, let us love. Football is fucking class. Everything else is meaningless distraction.
Onward!
8) Scotland will be awful, a bit better and then actually quite good when it's too late. Either that or they'll be great in the games they can't win and rubbish in the games they can. I will insist that Lawrence Shankland is pure world class despite him not actually being so.
9) Slavan Bilic will be the best pundit and if he's not there I might watch YouTube clips of him being and odd mixture of really intense and strangely dismissive during half time and that will mean he'll still be the best pundit in my head.
10) The whole thing will take what is awful about large scale international tournaments (the global brands covering absolutely everything with logos, the weird atmosphere that comes from stands full of executives and corporate friends of UEFA, the relentless management of every second of build up and post match via music and so on and so on) to a new level
11) You'll want to hate it, but despite it being objectively awful and leaving you yearning for the good old days of shit grounds, a riot and Barry Davies, you'll fall in love with it anyway, because it's football and football is tremendous and no matter what they do around the edges, international football retains something kind of pure about it because you can't buy the other teams best players and that, in an age where in domestic football, a player like Grealish can be bought by a state to gift to their insane Spanish football scientist purely for him to perform bizarre experiments on, is something kind of beautiful. You have to use what you have. There is no way to buy anyone. The end.
The good old days. Washed out colours. No co commentary. Civil war in the UK, countries that don't exist any more. Nigel Worthington.
12) There'll be a sense that *something is happening that isn't a war, a pandemic, a recession, the slow death of democracy or owt like that* - that will be great because it'll be right there and everywhere and almost everyone will be part of it and even if, like me, you don't actually have a clue, you'll be confidently saying things like 'yes, but that's Mainoo's game and we should exploit that not restrict it' or 'you've got to balance the fact Stones won't just sit in don't you?'
13) At some point, you'll realise you are totally immersed in it and it will feel like it will never end. Just as you notice that, you'll realise there's only a few group games to go and then, it will all suddenly seem to speed up, there'll be less and less and less, like a piece of paper being folded over and over and over, getting smaller and smaller and smaller and then... It'll be gone and you'll feel empty. England almost certainly won't have won. The clock will have ticked over and when the final final whistle blows another two years will have passed in the time it takes for that shrill blast to sound.
We mark our lives by these things. We work out what year it was by thinking about what happened that summer. Did Gazza cry? Was it when Van Basten swiveled on that volley? Were the Soviet Union in it or was it Russia? Did we fuck up spectacularly against Iceland? Was it the USA? Was it the summer that Tricky Trev got picked by accident and was actually really good? Did Rooney twat one? Was it pre/post Sven? Did we like or loathe Maguire at that point? What pub were you in? Did you watch it on your phone? Who did you hug in the joyful chaos that came before the perennial disappointment?
Odd years are marked by whether they came before or after even ones.
The first Euros I can remember was Jack Charlton and Ireland. England, failing in grinding it out and falling way short. Ruud Gullit and the Dutch being way better than everyone else. There were only 8 teams and yet, sitting as it does in my childhood memory, it seemed to be impossibly rich and to have lasted for months.
Now I am older, the tournament has about 800 teams and will last 4 times as long, the standard of football will be palpably better in almost every way, the coverage infinitely deeper and the clarity of the TV picture spectacularly sharper.
Somehow, the former will always seem more deep than the latter. Nothing will ever be as visceral as the the things in the past that shaped what we became.
I don't want to miss a kick though. I will, because I'm a person with a job who has to do things other than watch football sometimes.
I resent that hugely. I want to sit and watch the meaningless end of group games between minor European nations, one of whom has a player who used to play for Derby and the other, a bloke who is in the reserves at Bournemouth. I want to have nothing in my life other than this. The childhood freedom of nothing to do other than occasionally tidy your room and scribble the scores on a wall chart. I want to develop strong opinions on Albania or to be right there when Serbia make that substitute and things turn in the way I was when I was 10. I want to badly spell the names of exotic goalscorers in felt tip on shiny paper. Fuck, I want to go to the field and twat a ball against the wall and see myself in my minds eye playing the game I've just watched. Time is cruel. Growing up is overrated.
I could be cynical. I could write reams about UEFA and corruption and the cold dead hand of television, of global capital and free market ideals strangling the life out of the game. I could do that in a heartbeat and it would probably be better informed and more worthy than this shite I'm churning out right now but underneath all the sideshow hoopla, there is football.
For all that the fuss around the tournament will inevitably resemble one of those mad Amazon packages where you order a thing that arrives in a box 10 times it's size that contains enough bubble wrap to fill a medium sized sea with micro plastics, ultimately, in the midst of it, at the heart of the thing, at the epicentre of our days and our lives, there will be football.
 |
| Ladies and gentlemen. I give you... 'AI' |
Love is all there is. Love and death. So, before we die, let us love. Football is fucking class. Everything else is meaningless distraction.
Onward!
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The Athletic did this great miniseries where they did a 40 minute summary of every Euros since 1988. It was better.
ReplyDelete1988: Van Basten
1992: Denmark
1996: Euro 96
2000: France vs Italy
2004: Greece win despite being shite
2008: Spain actually win
2012 and 2016 I really couldn't concentrate cos they are so boring
I did enjoy the last one because England nearly won.
Like with Newcastle, I am only half joking, I might just give up on football once I actually see my team win something. I am enjoying that both teams are legit good, but the actual 'sport' I don't really like anymore.
I might choose a small team, you seem to be more into Blackpool because you aren't owned by Saudi Arabia, maybe some Pakistani looking bloke has shares in it but it turns out he's actually just got a Spanish nan