Around Euro 2024 – Day Four – Hamburg (Day 2)

Day Four – Monday 17th June 2024
Rest Day 1 (of 2)

No game today, and after three days of lengthy drives, it was a welcome break. Germany is a big place. The roads are good, and you can cover a lot of kilometres faster than in England, but there are a lot of kilometres to cover. And once you reach the accommodation, it’s generally a fair distance to the stadium for the match itself. We have used public transport to reach the matches in Berlin and Hamburg, and enjoyable as the whole experience is, it does take it out of you. 

 

For the two nights in Hamburg, we are staying in a quite idyllic hotel next to a river on the outskirts of the south-east of the city. It’s a fair distance from the centre, as the photos suggest, and as we were in need of a day doing nothing, we just relaxed and caught the three matches on a screen. 



It’s for the good of the tournament that we are seeing such surprise results as Romania’s beating Ukraine, and even more remarkable, Slovakia defeating Belgium, although I can’t help thinking that with only eight teams exiting after the 36 matches on the group phase, everyone that you’d expect to get through will end up doing so. Ultimately, these first two weeks of the tournament are jostling for position, like when the runners in the Epsom Derby are allocated their stalls. Were England to win their group and Belgium finish third in theirs, there is a chance they could meet in the round of 16. They created enough danger to win the game, but were unable to do what Slovakia did and actually score.

 

France won their opening game thanks to an own goal against Austria, and we were treated to the remarkable sight of Kylian M’bappe missing a one on one with the keeper. The French often tend to win their group matches narrowly and come good in the knockouts. On paper, all national bias aside, the two best sides in the finals are France and Portugal, and if they both win their groups, they could meet in the final itself. Didier Deschamps selected William Saliba to start on the left side of the central defence, and he performed competently enough. You can’t really argue with a clean sheet.

 

Just a short blog today. More tomorrow when we are back on the road for our third match, this one in Leipzig between Portugal and the Czech Republic.

 

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If you like this kind of thing, you can always revisit my Qatar 2022 blog entries - just search for 'Qatar 2022' in the labels

 

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