They say it was a day for the minnows at the Euros. Iceland drew with Portugal and Hungary beat Austria. Iceland, yes, are a surprise. They have become a strong footballing country out of nothing. But Hungary I have a harder time thinking of as a small football country. They have a wonderful history. Sure, most of it was in the 1950s and 60s but it is there. Iceland do not have that. And when my football life started, in 1982, they were at the World Cup. And again in 1986. I'd say it's more that they've gone through an extended bad run.
And I also can't really get my head aorund it being a surprise that they beat Austria. I would say it was unexpected, based on recent form. But Austria haven't exactly been a football giant in the time that Hungary were in the doldrums. They did qualify strongly but consider who was in their group.
The two supposedly strong teams were Sweden and Russia. Russia spent most of their qualifying campaign wondering whether Fabio Cappello was going to be sacked or not, or whether some oil and gas billionaire was going to pay his salary. And the Russians don't need much distraction to add to their normal inconsistency. Sweden are on a bit of a downward slope right now and are hardly the Sweden of a few years ago. Austria were the best of a weak group and came into the Euros on the back of 3 consecutive friendly defeats.
But that's not really what I was thinking about today. No, no I spent no time on any of the above!
What was brewing in my head was how after the first round of matches this tournament is missing some of the commonly present incidents at a major football tournament. So far we have not had:
1. A huge win for any team. There's always at least one 4-0, 5-0. We didn't even have a 3-1.
2. A ridiculous refereeing decision; no penalty for a foul that happened way outside the penalty area; no sending off of a player for blowing in the direction of an opponent
3. A wrongly awarded goal that has decided a match.
4. A hilarious incident that is more of a talking point than the actual match. No goalposts breaking, no player flipping over the advertising boards. The best so far was the mulitiple attempts by the Croatian medical team to stop Corluka's bleeding head...how many bandages and techniques did they try?
5. The emergence of a player barely known before the tournament started.
6. A really strong, dominant performance from any one team.
And feel free to add to the list.
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