Euro 2008

Every team has now played one match at the 2008 UEFA European Championships but what can we deduce from the opening eight games?

SWITZERLAND
• That without Alexander Frei and with Köbi Kuhn reluctant to start with the exciting youngster Eren Derdiyok, scorer on his début at Wembley, Switzerland look less likely to score than a priest at a W.I. meeting.

CZECH REPUBLIC
• That Jan Koller is not the striker he used to be and is certainly not the player he is when deprived of the presence of long-time strike partner Milan Baros.
• That, without the injured Arsenal playmaker Tomás Rosicky, their midfield lack the creativity and brains to make the price of a packet of tea.

TURKEY
• That they’re most exciting attacking player is an Englishman, and that you have to adopt a native name if you want to become a naturalized Turk (see Marcos ‘Mehmet’ Aurélio and Colin ‘Kâzim Kâzim’ Kazim-Richards).

PORTUGAL
• That they would probably still finish three points clear at the top of Group A if Cristiano Ronaldo, Deco and Nuno Gomes were to be kidnapped by a troop of the little-feared Swiss mafiosi.

AUSTRIA
• That they’re going to give it a jolly good go, chaps, as long as you don’t expect them to do anything complicated like pass the ball to a team-mate more than ten yards away or require the opposition goalkeeper to make a save.

CROATIA
• That, just because they beat England home and away in qualifying, it doesn’t necessarily follow that they’re that good and deserve to be among the favourites to lift the Henri Delauney trophy.

POLAND
• That the prospect of a free taxi-ride or loft conversion from a joyous migrant worker on the morning of Monday 30th June is pretty much nil.

GERMANY
• That an influx of Polish immigrants might nail your local plumbers’ earning power to the floor but it might leave England with a decent strike force in about 2028.

NETHERLANDS
• That they’re still Holland on ITV and the Netherlands on the good ol’ Beeb. Nice to see some dumbing up on public service broadcasting, our license fee is worth something, it seems… except none of their football pundits seem to know the offside rule, judging by their illogical criticism of the allowing of Ruud van Nistelrooy’s perfectly good goal against Italy.

ITALY
• That, without their injured captain Fabio Cannavaro, we might be spared the sight of Italy sitting back on a 1-0 lead - if they ever acquire one.
• That Materazzi is past it and Roberto Donadoni still doesn’t know on which side of the back four to play Gianluca Zambrotta.

FRANCE
• That Malouda and Anelka really are as rubbish as most Chelsea fans will tell you and that playing two wholly defensive central midfielders is an over-cautious act of footballing folly.

ROMANIA
• That reports of Victor Piturca being an ‘attack-minded’ coach are unfounded. God help them if Adrian Mutu gets injured or suspended.
• That only the excellent BBC commentator Steve Wilson knows what that little tail on a Romanian letter ‘T’ should sound like.

GREECE
• That they’re rubbish, frankly, and that their triumph at Euro 2004 remains one of the biggest crimes against football in the sport’s history.
• That coach Otto Rehhagel thinks that the back three ‘were not supposed to’ be passing the ball among each other for minutes at a time, yet it did not occur to him to take to the touchline to convey that sentiment to them at the time, suggesting he believed a 0-0 draw was the best he could hope for with his singly talentless squad.

SWEDEN
• That, no matter how many more 25-yard screamers he scores in his career, Zlatan Ibrahimovic will never have another goal quite so well received in every country north-east of Albania.

RUSSIA
• That it doesn’t matter how much nice, neat passing football your midfield can play, the goals are at the ends of the pitches and they ain’t gonna move to the centre circle.
• That Spain should be grateful to their agreeable appendix Andorra, against whom Andrei Arshavin - Russia’s best player - mystifyingly acquired a red card and the two-match suspension that kept him from causing Puyol and Marchena the slightest headache.
• That Guus Hiddink must have something against CSKA Moscow, whose back-three of Ignashevich and the Berezutsky twins were all kept in reserve to the inept central defensive partnership of Kolodin and Shirokov, and whose fine left-winger Zhirkov was pushed back to left-back.

SPAIN
• That the talented but disruptive Real Madrid duo of Raúl and Guti - both left out of Luis Aragonés’s squad - might be fine players but they are not the only decent footballers in Spain.
• That David Villa and Fernando Torres can play together after all.
• That the cloth-bound Gavin Peacock remains the only person at the BBC who can get within a mile of the correct pronunciation of Spanish names. His admirable circumnavigation of Daniel Güiza’s surname (pronounced ‘WEE-tha’) puts his colleagues continuous failure to grasp the sound of a Spanish ‘Z’ to shame.

Tags: Austria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Euro 2008, France, Germany, Greece, Holland, Italy, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Russia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey

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