The Monday Miscellany

Two further points on the European Championship format that I discussed last week. First, UEFA urgently need to replace their head-to-head rule for teams level on points at the end of the group stage. Goal difference works perfectly well in the World Cup and would not have left us already knowing all four group winners before the third round of matches. Had that been the case, Portugal, Croatia and the Netherlands might not have rested quite so many players and lost so much momentum going into their ultimately unsuccessful quarter finals. Nor would we have been left with two totally academic matches; Switzerland v Portugal and Spain v Greece.

If (when?) UEFA confirm that Euro 2016 will have 24 competing teams, they will do well to append an intention to use the format of the 1982 World Cup in Spain, when there was a second group stage involving four pools of three, the winners of which would procede to the semi finals. The 1986-1994 World Cups allowed four of the six 3rd placed teams to remain in the tournament, with hardly any of them deserving to do so. I recall the words of BBC commentator Gerald Sinstadt at the Uruguay v South Korea match at Italia ‘90; “Uruguay have scored the goal which, I’m sorry to say, will take them into the second round.” Uruguay’s Daniel Fonseca had just scored a last minute winner in a turgid match which ended 1-0, ‘earning’ the unwatchable and conservative South Americans a place in Round 2, where they were duly – and thankfully – beaten 2-0 by Italy.

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Ronaldinho will not be joining Manchester City, despite a rumoured £200,000 weekly wage being on offer. He was presumably dissuaded by the prospect of a trip to face a village team from the Faroe Islands as Manchester City begin their labyrinthine campaign in the woefully badly formatted and bloated UEFA Cup. It turns out he wants to join Milan, as he wants Champions League football… oh, hang on…

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There will be virtually no live football on the BBC for a year, before they begin their Championship and Carling Cup contract in August 2009. This means less work for Alan Shearer, a wonderful player in his day but a singularly unilluminating pundit. If only Martin O’Neill didn’t have a proper job, Match of the Day might have a top class studio partnership. Shearer, O’Neill, Hansen and co have now returned from their jolly to Vienna along with an army of ‘roaming reporters’ whose expositions from the fan-mile were as superfluous as they were homogeneous. Happy expenses, lads.

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Another era ending at the Beeb after Euro 2008 is the career – as a live broadcaster, at least – of John Motson, their sheepskin-wearing, stat-wielding principal commentator, who will carry on working with Match of the Day but will not go to the 2010 World Cup in South Africa. We await speculation on who will cover that Final for the BBC, though Jonathan Pearce would be a sound choice. His assured, measured style is far preferable to the big-mouth approach he adopted in the early days of Channel Five in the late 90s and is beginning to echo Barry Davies, who remains criminally wasted doing only the occasional tennis match and Olympic hockey or gymnastics competitions. Davies briefly broke the Motson monopoly at the BBC in the mid-90s, commentating on the 1994 World Cup Final and the FA Cup Finals of 1995 and 1996 and remains the finest sports commentator the country has ever produced.

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Waitakere Utd, the unremarkable champions of New Zealand, will once again compete in the annual FIFA Club World Cup, one of many unwelcome effects of Australia defecting from the OFC to the AFC despite common sense and geography. New Zealand, a country which cares little for football, are consequentially virtually guaranteed qualification to every Confederations Cup, the next edition of which will take place next year in South Africa as a dress rehearsal for the 2010 World Cup. For European champions Manchester Utd, the trip to Japan in mid-December is another distraction from domestic football after they take on Zenit St Petersburg in the UEFA Super Cup in Monaco on Friday 29th August.