So we come to Euro 2012 in Ukraine and Poland. I never was convinced of the validity of these two countries as a joint venue, and the stories we hear as we approach the tournament are not encouraging. Blimey - if it's enough to put England fans off travelling, then things must be bad! Let us hope that the tournament passes off without any major hitches.
On the field I have a feeling it's going to be a negative tournament. The trouble is that success can be achieved by negativity - you don't actually have to win or seek to win football matches to win football tournaments. Chelsea have proved that recently in the Champions League and Greece have proved it before in Euro 2004.
I know there's more than one way to win a football match, but we must do away with the odious penalty shoot-out and think of a better way to encourage teams to actually score goals - that is meant to be the object of the game after all. I have always advocated taking a player off each team every five minutes during extra time, and just play on till someone scores.
The old Golden Goal didn't really work - and it didn't work because there was still the back-up of a penalty shoot-out. Get rid of it! If you take a player off from each team during extra time and they know they MUST SCORE to win, then a goal will come. It will have to!
I can see teams trying to stifle the teams that want to attack and, having seen Barcelona fail this season, lesser teams will be encouraged to snuff the light out of the more enterprising teams.
Sadly, England fall into the "lesser team" category (they have done for years, but it seems that everyone has finally realised it htis tiem round!), so don't expect many goals in England's games. I could yet end up hoping against hope that they can win a penalty shoot-out!
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nice work
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