So, Croatia. Their squad might not be packed with talent as it was in the late 90s (Suker, Boban, Prosinecki, Boksic) but they’re still effective, as shown in the 2-2 draw with France. With that in mind, it was nice to see a much more controlled England performance on Monday evening. Well, okay… up to a point. Where dodgy substitute selection was our undoing in the first match and clumsy over-zealousness made the Switzerland game unnecessarily laboured, the Croatia match provided a new insight… we hate set pieces, especially when balls are played across the face of goal. We’ve let in four goals in this tournament so far… one penalty and three free kicks.
Still, as a pundit or two will probably say before the end of the week, it’s not the goals you let in, but the goals you score which count. Putting aside that habitual English self-deprecation for a moment, we looked damn good in attack. The “next Pele” tabloid drivel is overstating things somewhat, but Wayne Rooney is on superb form, and some of the passing moves against Croatia were quite stunning.
On a slightly sadder note, that was the last first-round match shown on the BBC. I’m not particularly interested in pundits or commentators, so any TV coverage is fine by me, but the banality of some of the ITV commentary has really grated at times. Their regular updates on “how the table will be if the current scores remain the same” are boring and pointless, and there have been several instances of lazy reporting (“Greece are through… [later]… Greece are *probably* through”).
[EDIT... I originally took issue with the "Italy cannot progress if Denmark and Sweden draw with two or more goals apiece" theory. Under standard rules, that would be true... Italy drew with Denmark (the first criterion) and so would need to beat Bulgaria by a three-goal margin (or a two-goal margin, providing they scored at least one more goal than Denmark).
However, it seems the goal difference and goals scored criteria only apply for the matches *between* the tying teams. None of the goals against Bulgaria counted. Bizarre, but it is UEFA after all... I wonder when we'll see the "Silver Goal" used for the first time...]
The daftest thing has been the claim of match rigging from the Italy camp. Aside from the fact that a team of Italy’s quality shouldn’t have got themselves into such a mess in the first place, didn’t it occur to them that two neighbouring nations might just have the *slightest* urge to beat each other? I mean, think about it… England and Scotland engineering a mutually beneficial draw? Holland and Germany? Brazil and Argentina?