Euro 2024 Shocks

After an enforced break from the blog to deal with a health issue, this blog is back on the day Euro 2024 experienced it’s biggest shocks so far.

I’m not talking about England recovering from that loss to Iceland in their final warm-up friendly to stagger past Serbia in their opening match, cause we finally have a team that knows how to turn it on for tournaments. We have become the new Germany but, as we saw on Friday they haven’t lost the knack for that either.

I’m actually talking about our fellow favourites France needing an own goal to crawl to victory over Ralf Rangnick’s unfancied Austrians.

Less than 3 minutes after Christoph Baumgartner spurned a glorious chance when 1-on-1 with Mike Maignan, it was Max Wober who had the unfortunate honour of nodding a Kylian Mbappe cross past Patrick Pentz and into his own net.

Mbappe and the rest of France’s attack flattered to deceive for the rest of the match and only once came close to doubling their lead.

The Wizard, who fired his nation to the World Cup final 2 years ago, did the hard part to beat his marker just inside the Austrian half and carry the ball all the way into the penalty area before screwing up the easy part and smashing the ball wide of the right-hand post.

If that is a sign of what’s to come from France then Poland and the Dutch can rest easy.

France however are in the thankless position of having to reboot a stuttering strikeforce without their talisman, who had to be removed from the action late on with a facial injury which looked like a broken nose

Romania on the other hand can continue to celebrate for the rest of the week if events today in their group are an indicator of what’s to come.

The Tricolours ripped their neighbours to shreds with a simple 3-0 victory as Ukraine suffered a chastening start to their Euro’s campaign. Could have been worse though, they could have been Belgium.

Clear favourites to top their group the Red Devils, ranked 3rd in the FIFA Rankings, came unstuck in spectacular fashion against a Slovakia team that many had pinned as the whipping boys of the group.

It took just 7 minutes for Belgium to shoot themselves in the foot by gifting their opponents with a goal on a plate that was quickly snaffled up, thanks to a signature defensive mix-up to give themselves a mountain to climb.

The worst thing was just how close they came to doing so even getting the ball in the back of the net twice, only for both of Romelu Lukaku’s emphatic finishes to be chalked off.

The first fell foul to a tight offside call, but not one that Belgium can feel too hard done by.

They can feel righteously hard done by the decision to disallow the second though as the ‘handball’ VAR found in the build up to the goal was harsher than the legendary Bloody Code. There was no way for the winger to avoid the ball bouncing up onto his hand as he ran in behind the Slovakian defence.

If that’s a handball then there will be hundreds given in every match across every league the world over. I’m sure there was a line in the rule somewhere about an ‘unnatural position’ and the hand was in the most natural position possible.

Whilst Belgium will point to those decisions to explain their loss away, in truth it was the sheer amount of wasted opportunities that cost them the match.

Having the ball in the net twice in a match would be great for most teams, but given Belgium’s dominance of proceedings it was scant return for their industry. Woodwork and insane goal-line clearances thwarted them on multiple occasions, but an unacceptable number of chances were sent high and wide.

It’s finishing like that which will fill the Tricolours with expectations of a positive result from their Saturday showdown with the Belgians.

Of all the shocks that could have happened at these Euros the team ranked 3rd in the world messing up a group that looked like a gimmie on paper is not the one many expected by it’s the one we got from this goal laden tournament so far.

Roll on the opening games of Group F.