OK, now that all the teams have played once, here are some initial thoughts on the tournament:
- Let's not BS around, it should be called Euro 2021 rather than Euro 2020. It's just stupid keeping it with last year in the name.
- There are too many teams in the tournament now. The Euros used to be more prestigious than the World Cup, mainly because there were no easy games. That's no longer the case.
- Isn't it good to have fans at the game, even in a limited capacity, rather than have to endure the piped-in artificial crowd noise. Games are infinitely better when there is a decent atmosphere.
- We haven't had a VAR controversy yet. Don't worry, it's coming.
- Not actually that many games I've watched all the way through. I tend to watch replays so that I can fast forward through to the goals and/or half-time/full-time highlights. Exceptions have included the England game, and the France/Germany game today - which was probably the biggest heavyweight match-up in this round of fixtures. I suspect I will watch more as we get further into the tournament.
- Also, hate the early kickoffs - which are 6 am local time for me and therefore too early to watch live. So I didn't watch either the England game or Scotland game live. I could probably make an effort to avoid knowing the score before watching the replay, but in the case of the England game I knew the result before watching which definitely took something away from the experience.
- ESPN have the coverage of the Euros here. The good thing, all the games have been on their cable channel rather than ESPN+ (their streaming service which I don't have). The bad thing, the commentary and particularly the studio coverage of the games is not good. At times, unwatchable. Really puts in perspective how good the Premier League coverage has been (which is on NBC rather than ESPN), but that has been ruined by showing too many games exclusively on Peacock (NBC's streaming platform). At least it isn't as bad as CBS, who had the Champions League rights here and whose coverage of that was the absolute worst.
- First impressions of the teams:
- Teams that England can't beat: Belgium, France
- Teams that match up well with England: Spain
- Teams that won 3-0 but who I still think England can beat: Italy, Portugal
- Teams that England can beat and need to beat for the national psyche: Germany
- Teams that England should beat: everyone else
- Talking of England, I wasn't blown away by their performance but the 3 points was very welcome. Mentally, that was important - to win our first game, and against the team that beat us at the last World Cup. I think England can and will perform better, and we still need to work out our best team selection, but I remain quietly optimistic that we can go quite far. Now watch us put in an absolute stinker against Scotland.
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