Euro 2020: Done with the Group Stage

Just to follow up on the last post, I can now give the full roundup of goal statistics from the group stage (presumably to much rejoicing across multiple continents). As I noted, as of Match Day 2 there had been more goals scored in Euro 2020 than at the same time in Euro 2016, but Match Day 3 has been a feast of goals, not least because of the unexpected goalfest on Wednesday, where the two remaining Group E games produced 5 goals each, and those in Group F produced 4 goals apiece.

To put it another way, those four matches accounted for 18 goals, compared with 21 goals across the eight matches to wrap up the other four groups. And those other groups did feature some high-scoring games, such as Denmark's miraculous 4-1 defeat of Russia to snatch second place in the group and qualification for the round of 16.

Also impressive is the fact that there haven't been any more 0-0 draws since the second match day, presumably because the third-place qualifying for the knockout rounds meant that so many groups had something to play for, and so they came out to win. The podcasts I've been listening to have been pretty down on the new format, as introduced in 2016, but I wonder if it's succeeded in providing the right amount of jeopardy that's forced teams to go for wins rather than playing cagily. After all, as someone pointed out on Totally Football, England was set to face each of the four teams from Group F at some point on the day, as the ranking swung around based on who'd scored.

Admittedly it's not too inspiring that Ukraine squeaked through with a single win and two losses, beating out Finland and Slovakia on goal difference. That said, Slovakia were the architects of their own downfall by not only losing 5-0 to Spain, but by gifting them two of those goals. The best own-goal, indeed, has to be Slovakia goalkeeper Martin Dubravka jumping up to palm the ball over the crossbar, only to (inexplicably) palm it downward into his own goal.

Incidentally, the own-goal tally for the tournament is now up to 8, compared with 9 for every European Championship from 1976 to 2016 (which itself set a record, with 3 own-goals). I talked last time about why this might be happening, but it's worth noting that 3 of those 8 came from goalkeepers, and two of those were freak bounces off the keeper at an awkward time. Which just makes Dubravka's howler more inexplicable, because if he had but remembered which direction was up... alas.

This all means we're now at the business end of the tournament, where one team goes on and one team goes home. I'm cautiously optimistic about Italy's chances against Austria, but if they do win that game they have the privilege of facing either Portugal or Belgium. And if Italy manages to surmount that challenge, they'd next face likely France or Spain (or Croatia, or more remotely Switzerland) on their way to the final.

It's hard to know how to feel about Italy's showing so far: I'm used to them imploding at some point in a tournament, but what worries me is that I can't see where that implosion will come this time around. My hope is that coach Roberto Mancini has instilled a more Northern European ethos in the team, and we won't get more of those timid displays where Italy sets out to play for a draw - but you never know. At the very least, if Italy does make it to the final it'll be on the back of beating a bunch of traditionally strong teams.

And if they go on to win, it'll be a little disappointing not to be in London, as I was in 2006, to see the city's numerous Italians go nuts celebrating in the streets of the West End. But at least the tournament's on, so I won't complain too much.

Euro 2020: Better than 2016 (or at least there's been more goals)

Looking back over some of my posts from the 2016 tournament I saw something suggesting that it hadn't been a great tournament (a sentiment echoed on Football Weekly), so I decided to figure out how many goals we've had per game. the other thing that inspired me to check it out was seeing Sweden and Spain grind out a 0-0, so I wanted to see how quickly Euro 2016 had produced that scoreline.

Both tournaments have featured two 0-0 draws by the end of Match Day 2, but in 2016 those both came on the second match day, whereas for 2020 they've been spread across the two days so far. But notably, 2020 has so far been a higher-scoring tournament:

• The total goals-per-game for 2020 is 2.29, compared with 1.96 at the same point in 2016
• Match Day 1 in 2020 yielded 2.33 goals per game, while in 2016 it was just 1.83
• Match Day 2 in 2020 declined slightly to 2.25, but in 2016 it grew to 2.08
• The highest scoring game at this point in the tournament in 2016 featured 4 goals, but 2020 has so far had three games that saw 4 or more goals

The talk so far among the podcasts I listen to is that 2020 is shaping up to be more fun than 2016. That statement revolves around more than just goals, but goals are relevant to the statement in that they record moments of drama. By this reckoning, Germany's 4-2 defeat of Portugal featured six such moments, and it would be churlish to argue that those goals weren't dramatic: Portugal's early lead from a Ronaldo tap-in being eliminated by two own-goals in the first half, and then Germany scoring two further goals early in the second half.

Speaking of own-goals: so far there have been 5, prompting jokes about how Own Goal is the leading scorer of the tournament. This number certainly beats out Patrik Schick and Cristiano Ronaldo, who have each scored just three. By contrast 2016 featured just three own-goals across the entire tournament. This could be because of tiredness from the weird season-and-a-half just gone, or the fact that the teams are going for it - but either way, it's a notable side effect of all this pressing that the teams have been doing.

As for penalties, there have been four so far in 2020, and there were four at this same point in 2016, suggesting that this aspect of discipline is holding constant for the moment. For the 2016 tournament as a whole, there were 12 penalties awarded, of which 8 were scored. Wikipedia's page for Euro 2020 stats doesn't currently record the number of penalties awarded, but I'll report back if that changes.

In any case, the tournament seems to be marked by positive, attacking football, which means a lot of defenders are making mistakes (including own-goals), but also means there's a lot going on. Let's hope it continues this way into Match Day 3.

Euro 2020: Finally Here

I was all set to title this inaugural Euro 2020 post something along the lines of "Good Start", but then yesterday's horrific event happened, where Danish midfielder Christian Eriksen collapsed from what looks like a cardiac arrest, so something too triumphal felt out of place.

Luckily, he was saved, in part because the stadium where that game took place is basically right next to the best hospital in Denmark. I'm also going to forego the invidious comparisons between Danish and US healthcare, because he'd have gotten the same speed and level of care here. The main thing to say is that it's a relief they saved him, and hopefully he makes a speedy recovery.

In terms of the actual football, though, it is good that it's back. It never entirely left, of course: since last year we've had a season and a half, plus the second edition of the Nations League. And even when the 2019-20 season was interrupted, the football podcasts kept going, with retrospectives on notable games from the past.

This is different, because the crowds are back. None of the stadia are completely full, which is as it should be, since the pandemic is far from vanquished (just check out the uptick in UK cases if you don't believe me). Yet the sight of the Stadio Olimpico in Rome hosting Andrea Bocelli singing Nessun Dorma, and the pyrotechnics and choreography, is a welcome echo of the pre-Covid world. Another such echo was the sound when England scored the single goal in today's match against Croatia, that "YES" the crowd shouts in unison that has always been so satisfying to hear on Match of the Day.

My girlfriend teases me about all the nostalgic posts I write here, but it's clear that I'm not the only one thinking back to happier times during this tournament. This might just be because I listen to so many British football podcasts, but Euro 1996 and that Three Lions song (which I love, incidentally) are all over the coverage I'm seeing. 

On top of that, Bocelli singing Nessun Dorma is a direct reference back to Italia 90, when Luciano Pavarotti sang it. That World Cup was a huge touchpoint for my generation, and though it passed me by almost completely, when I got into football a few years later everybody was still talking about it... it even effectively launched the career of James Richardson, who made his name reporting on Italian football in the wake of the interest that the British public found after 1990.

The presence of the Danes is also evoking the unlikely victors of 1992, when they only joined the tournament last minute as replacements for Yugoslavia. Denmark had failed to qualify for the 8-team tournament that year, coming second to Yugoslavia, but then got called in when Yugoslavia had to withdraw owing to its civil war. It's unclear something like that will happen again this year, but the tournament frequently throws up shocks, so we'll see what happens.

The main thing that fans are responding to, I believe, is the gradual return to normalcy. It's fatuous to say that football is the single most important driver of culture in Europe, but it's notable that the pandemic was one of the few times all football ceased throughout the continent (apart from Belarus, I guess). As the Guardian's writers noted, not even the Second World War completely stopped football in England, even if the First Division had to be suspended.

I detect a sense of giddiness among the journalists and podcasters, now that the football really is coming back and the fans are back with it. Tournament summers are always sunny and pleasant in my memory, even if the years that surrounded them were pretty grim (I even found myself recalling the summer of 2008 fondly, even though the rest of the year was pretty much a shitshow for me), and this summer has already promised to be another fun one.

And frankly, why shouldn't it be? Europe is still facing the threats of the pandemic, rising far-right nationalism, trouble-making from the authoritarian countries on its fringes and the threat of its own economic and cultural irrelevance in the face of the US and China. Football, however, is the one thing Europe has that the rest of the world wants, and the European Championships are a good showcase of the strength and cultural reach of football... after all, I still remember when the networks here wouldn't carry the tournament at all.

At the same time, the Euros are a chance for the disparate countries of Europe to share their love of something, notwithstanding their fractious nature the rest of the year. Like the Eurovision Song Contest (something I resolutely do not watch), the Euros are a festival that takes no account of the politics that have taken place during the previous four years - case in point, the presence of England, despite all its moves to separate itself from the continent otherwise.

Sometimes the politics do filter in, like the glee that accompanied England being knocked out by Iceland the same week as the Brexit referendum. But in general the Euros (and the World Cup) are a big party, where everybody just gets to enjoy the football and add new memories to their series of tournament summers.

So yes, I'm glad the Euros are back, and that Italy started out strongly, and I'm even glad that English fans are parping about how "it's only bloody coming home". Because this year, amid all the death and sickness and chaos, football really has come home.

Revisiting Wildstorm: Too Many Justice League Clones

You knew it had to happen. My great comics re-read has brought me to Wildstorm comics, the line around which my interest in comics was rekindled back in 1999 or so, and which introduced me to Warren Ellis.

lI've actually been reading them for a couple of months now, having shifted from Vertigo to the America's Best Comics sub-imprint of Wildstorm (specifically League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, volume 1). Wildstorm is kind of an odd creation, since it started as one of the founding books of Image Comics, when Jim Lee decided to write and draw WildC.A.T.s, his own X-Men knock-off.

It's... not awesome, at least at first. The art was pretty good, as you'd expect, and the concept of an alien proxy war taking place on Earth was pretty fun, but WildCATs (I'm going to write it like this from now on) does feel like an overwrought Chris Claremont-era issue of Uncanny X-Men. At the time I picked up, and still own, the entire first mini-series, and I remember getting the first issue of Stormwatch, though that's a book that didn't survive an earlier declutter.

I gave up on Image after a while, and didn't think about any of it for a couple of years, until I started hearing about books like Planetary and The Authority. I can't remember exactly how I got wind of them, but it could have been the owner of a comics shop across the street from UC Irvine, who helped turn me onto a number of good books at the time, especially with his graphic novel lending library.

In the intervening years Wildstorm had expanded into its own little universe, separate from Image and then acquired by DC, and had also convinced a number of good writers to rejuvenate it. So we got Alan Moore blowing up WildCATs with his Homecoming and Gang War storylines, as well as Warren Ellis revitalizing Stormwatch. Even Gen13 got turned from a constant cheesecake-fest to a decent book, thanks to manga-enthusiast Adam Warren. Its sub-imprints also formed the home of Cliffhanger (J Scott Campbell's Danger Girl and Joe Madureira's Battlechasers) and Homage Comics (Kurt Busiek and Alex Ross's Astro City, which is another of the best comics of all time).

So the collection I still have is the initial WildCATs run from the early Image launch, a WildCATs relaunch by Scott Lobdell and Travis Charest, the Ellis and Mark Millar runs of the Authority, and Planetary. There are also a couple of stray issues of Gen13, along with the first collection from its ongoing series, but I felt a bit embarrassed reading that - there was a heavy emphasis on the female characters' state of undress and sexuality (including a dated and kind of off-putting subplot of Freefall being squicked out by Rainmaker's bisexuality), and a sense of humor that fell flat more often than not. The second storyline also featured art by Jim Lee, which should have been promising, except his poses and body shapes were all bizarrely inhuman and off-putting. That collection is slated to go to Goodwill next time I have a cull.

More successful is the Stormwatch and Authority collection. Warren Ellis used Stormwatch as a vehicle to explore some of his political and conspiratorial preoccupations, as well as interrogating the nature of superheroism through teams like The High, which were essentially thinly veiled allegories of the Justice League. Sadly I only have the A Finer World storyline, which introduced the characters and concepts he'd explore in The Authority, but it's a nice showcase of Bryan Hitch's art.

In some ways The Authority feels dated now, as the discussion of superheroes actually making the world a better place has been supplanted by unease at the idea of superheroes running around and doing whatever they want. Marvel's cinematic universe sidesteps this idea, and DC's tries to engage it but not always successfully, but the upshot is that the Authority seems dead as a concept - at the very least I can't find evidence that DC is doing anything with it now that it's integrated the Wildstorm universe into its overall DC universe.

All the same, Ellis and Hitch's issues of The Authority are gorgeous. They go by in a flash, because of the widescreen, decompressed storytelling that Ellis was playing with at the time, but Hitch's art is amazingly detailed, and helped immeasurably by Paul Neary's inks and Laura Depuy's coloring (later Laura Martin).

Then Mark Millar and Frank Quitely took over, and the book lost something. It started strong, with a story about a search for the Spirit of the 21st Century, and despite loads of violence and gore, a largely peaceful resolution of the arc. But then it fell apart with the second storyline, and went seriously off the rails with the third, when delays in Frank Quitely's art and Mark Millar's scripts meant the book took ages to come out. It had devolved into a morass of violence and snark and, frankly, facile storytelling, so that I've never really been able to warm to Millar's work since then.

And now I'm on Planetary. Like Authority, it can feel dated at times. And also like Authority, it features a staggering number of thinly veiled Justice League analogues, which makes me wonder how you can swing a cat in the Wildstorm universe without hitting a Superman clone. But it still lands as a metaphor, in which uncommon super-characters investigate how an evil Fantastic Four has distorted the world of pulp and adventure fiction by making us forget about the origins of the medium we love.

It's also helped by the gorgeous and idiosyncratic art of John Cassaday, who seems to me to be one of the most detailed comics artists I've ever seen. Bryan Hitch seems to thrive on epic vistas with starships and armies clashing, but Cassaday has an impressive grasp of facial features and dynamic movement.

Unfortunately I never got to buy the final issues, so I don't know how the story ends or how most of the mysteries that Ellis lays down are resolved. I suppose I could go looking for the trade paperbacks, but I have the sense those aren't the easiest things to find either.

Still, it's always amazing to me to imagine that Wildstorm went from an X-Men knock-off to the home of some of the best comics of the past 20 years. Even if I didn't love what Mark Millar was doing with the Authority, it was at least different from the mainstream DC and Marvel work of the time, which felt so much like the same stuff they'd been doing in the 80s and 90s.

It's also a little sad to me that the Wildstorm universe died a death - first being destroyed by a crossover and then being subsumed into the wider DC universe, so that now Superman clones like Apollo and Majestic can actually hang out with Superman. Warren Ellis tried resurrecting the universe a couple of years ago, but it didn't feel the same, like a place of infinite weirdness and possibility - rather it was just more of the same nihilism and grimness. So maybe it's my own tolerance for that type of story that's waned?

Champions League Final 2021: The European Super League Non-Committed Members Final

Caught the Champions League final yesterday, as I always do, and I've been thinking about the narratives I could take from it. There were a few, the most obvious one being the fact mentioned in the title, which is that Chelsea and Manchester City were the first two members of the mooted European Super League to pull out when everyone got all up in arms about it.

I think the most interesting one, though, is the fact that this is the eighth final overall that was contested between two teams from the same country. If you narrow it down to the current era of Big 4 dominance (the big 4 being Spain, England, Germany and Italy), it's the sixth time this has happened since 2004, which was the last final in which a Big 4 team wasn't involved. It's also the third all-English final, compared with two all-Spanish finals in the same period (Real Madrid v Atletico Madrid in 2014 and 2016), and one all-German final (Bayern Munich v Borussia Dortmund in 2013). Prior to 2004 there were just two such finals, in 2000 (Real Madrid v Valencia) and 2003 (Milan v Juventus).

This has been my hobbyhorse for a few years now (or you could say for as long as I've had this blog), but I find that the increasing weight given to the Big 4 countries has distorted the competition in unfortunate ways. I understand the argument that viewers would rather see the stars of Madrid and Barcelona in the final, than Partizan Belgrade vs Benfica, to pull two teams out at random. Indeed, this was the reasoning behind the ESL, and the reason why I think that idea hasn't been killed off completely.

On the other hand, European games between teams from the same country are frequently less than stellar - the most recent example being the 2019 final, when Liverpool beat Spurs 2-0. This is just like when the biggest teams play one another in the league: they play more conservatively because they'd rather avoid losing than positively go out and win. Yesterday's game is a pretty good example, since there was just one goal, at the end of the first half, and Man City didn't manage any shots on goal after about 20 minutes.

I think this was one of the best arguments against the ESL, incidentally - part of what makes the European cup special is seeing match-ups that you wouldn't get to see normally, like Real Madrid against Manchester United or Barcelona vs Bayern Munich. But even before the ESL these match-ups were becoming commonplace - for instance two of this season's quarterfinals were rematches of the previous two finals (Bayern vs PSG in 2020 and Real vs Liverpool in 2019).

On top of that, the club of winners is growing increasingly rarefied. This may have been Man City's first Champions League final, but it was the third time Chelsea had contested it, and the second time they won. Indeed, Chelsea is the most recent first-time winner, having first won the tournament in 2012; before them the previous first-time winner was Borussia Dortmund, all the way back in 1997. Beyond Dortmund there were three other teams who won it for the first time in 1990s, among whom are Barcelona, and six who won it for the first time in the 1980s.

Of course, the reason it was so much more open then is that the tournament didn't feature so many teams from so few countries. That's also why we've started seeing so many match-ups from a single country - if half the places are already guaranteed to go to the top four teams from each of the top four countries (plus another three from France and two from Russia) then it's actually quite hard for none of the Big 4 to be represented in the final.

The odd thing about this type of match-up is how the teams have placed in their league. Man City won the Premier League pretty handily this season, while Chelsea just squeaked into fourth place on the final day, despite losing to Aston Villa. They notched up 67 points compared with Man City's 86, so it's pretty clear that over the course of the 380 games that made up this EPL season, City were the best team overall. Yet they lost to a team that performed nowhere near as impressively and had to make a mid-season managerial change.

Does that mean that Chelsea are actually better than City? No, even if City were hamstrung by Pep Guardiola overthinking his tactics and playing everyone out of the positions in which they did so well. But it also doesn't mean Chelsea aren't deserving champions, even if they only qualified for this tournament by coming in fourth in last season's EPL.

We can argue the merits of the current Champions League format all we want, but it's maybe a little sobering to think that the fourth-best team in England is better than any of the other champions in Europe. If that's true, then it says something about the gulf in class between the Big 4 leagues and those in the rest of Europe. The ESL wasn't aiming to fix that, but let's also not pretend that the status quo is in any way equitable.

Another Premier League Season Done and Dusted

I don't usually mark the end of the Premier League season, but this has been such a remarkable one that it felt right to note down some thoughts on the final day. You can't argue that anything particularly surprising happened on this last match day, particularly the identities of the top four teams, but given how it's blurred in with last season it's just felt like such a long marathon to get here.

That marathon aspect is the first thing I want to talk about, since the season started late, owing to the long break last season when the pandemic hit. That delay meant the 2019-2020 season ended late, and left us with an abnormally short summer break - the narrative for the players all this season has been the fatigue and risk of injuries caused by not having a proper break over the summer. This all means that the past two seasons have blurred together, so that it's hard to remember that, for example, Bruno Fernandes has now been at Manchester United for about a year and a half, or that Aston Villa stayed up by the skin of their teeth in 2020 (when this season started I honestly thought they'd gone down).

The other reason that 2020 to now has felt like one long slog is that my beloved football podcasts haven't had a break either. When the previous season ended, Football Weekly had a wrap-up episode to talk about what had just happened, and then the following week launched into preparations for the season that was about to start a few weeks hence. I think we might have a similar situation this summer, as the upcoming European Championships mean that Football Weekly and Totally Football won't be taking long breaks to recharge.

As for the winners, it's felt a bit anticlimactic that, after the upheaval of 2020 and all its knock-on effects, the champions should be Manchester City again, for the third time in the last four seasons. This is not to detract from their achievement, since they not only came back from a slow start to win the league by 12 points, but they did it by adapting their tactics to the new circumstances of everybody being exhausted and without their main goalscorer, Sergio Aguero. 

Much was made of how out of sorts the big teams were - for instance, when reigning champions Liverpool lost 7-2 to Aston Villa - but City did well to manage their energy, especially in the nervy last few weeks before they clinched the title. There was a point where City lay 10 points ahead of Manchester United, and the title was likely theirs but not sewn up, and they lost a couple of games, which kept the title race plodding along. At the time it was clear that they could afford to drop points, in order to have their first team fresh for the Champions League (and they're now in the final of that competition, so Guardiola's strategy worked).

It's also interesting that City win this season with the lowest total points for a champion since Leicester won the Premier League in 2015-2016 (86 vs 81). More than indicating that City were out of sorts, I feel that total reflects Guardiola's concession that his team didn't need to win every single game to lock in the title - it's just an interesting contrast to the 2017-2018 season where they steamrolled everything in their path to end the season on a record 100 points.

The final notable aspect of this season was the fallout from the European Super League. Man City was, of course, one of the teams involved, but also one of the first to pull back from those plans. That short summer break between seasons likely cut into the top clubs' income by not allowing them their traditional off-season tours of foreign markets, and that lack of money is what precipitated the ESL announcement. Luckily, fan voices made themselves heard in this case, and the plan lasted less than a week, but it would have been an even better repudiation of the ESL if Leicester had managed to beat Tottenham today and get into the Champions League places - especially given that the ESL was a clear response to Leicester's unexpected title triumph in 2015-2016.

In any case, this season's now been consigned to the history books. I'm looking forward to a little break from the weekly football grind, when I'll be watching Euro 2020 daily. But mostly I'm hoping for a more successful fantasy league season in 2021-22, as this one was roundly disappointing.

Spoiler-Filled Thoughts on Ted Lasso

Just finished watching Ted Lasso the other day, and I'm left with The Feels, to a certain extent. I'll be talking about plot points from all over Season 1, so consider this your spoiler warning for anything after the break: