Euro 2024

Well, it’s the Final this evening. England vs Spain.

The purists and neutrals will cheer for a Spanish team that’s been brilliant all tournament. But I rather feel that England will manage a win despite themselves, as they have all tournament, stumbling from one unlikely success to the next.

At which point, all hell will break loose. The whole of England will go mental, having been starved of any success since 1966 when they (controversially) won the World Cup.

And for the Welsh, Scots, and Irish who also inhabit these islands, it’ll be a fucking nightmare to have to endure, from now until hell freezes over. We’ll never hear the end of it, the useless cunts.

(Secretly, I’ll be quite happy to see them win. But I’ll still hate to have to endure the triumphalism that’ll come after it.)
 
Go England!

Shades of 1588!
 
Darkenblot said:
Go England!

Shades of 1588!
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Ah, very good. Yes, one in the eye for the Spanish on that occasion.


By the way, here’s a thing I always find remarkable. The very next year, 1589, saw the English Armada set sail to do to Spain what it had failed to do to England in 1588.

The English fleet was much larger than the Spanish one had been in 1588. And the defeat the English suffered in 1589 was even greater than Spain’s a year earlier.

And yet … the whole escapade is almost completely unknown. Most histories fail to even record it. Most school teachers haven’t even heard of it.

The English just told the better narrative, all about the Spanish defeat and ‘God blew and scattered his enemies’ and old Queenie having ‘the heart and stomach of a king’ and all that shite, and at the same time they completely excised from their histories their greater humiliation the following year.

And to mix threads, that’s why you don’t need elaborate conspiracies. You just need to be holding the pen.
 
Well yeah, defeating an invasion force impacts more on the national psyche than an expedition being defeated.

Government officials and navy people immediately tried to cover the Armada's failure.

Good thing the Internet wasn't around back then!
 
#6 blew this game for England.

No excuse for getting beat there.

Southgate chokes again.
 
Wait, someone bet England over Spain?

Never, ever.
 
I don't even know if this goes here. All this shit looks the same to me.
 
Crow said:
I don't even know if this goes here. All this shit looks the same to me.
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Might as well keep it here. No point in starting a second thread.
 
Crow said:
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Does your old heart good to see. There's a fine tradition of fans forcing their way into stadiums for football, though it is unusual in all-seater stadiums.

When stadiums were mainly standing (ie no seats), it was pretty usual that many more would squeeze in. Hampden Park in Glasgow used to have an official capacity of 126,000 but they would regularly get over 200,000 (up until about 1975). I remember speaking to people who had either climbed over the walls to get in or, if you knew which entrance to go to, you could slip a fiver to the bloke on the turnstile (instead of the ticket which you didn't have and was the only thing the gatekeeper should have been accepting) and get in that way.

But even in 2020 in London, with all-seater stadiums and security in place, there was still a crowd charge by the English fans to get in without tickets at Wembley at the last Euro championships.

But having said that, and to be serious, seems to me that a key problem in Miami was the inability to handle a huge crowd like this. The reports would seem to suggest that normal control measures like security rings around the stadium weren't in place. They're pretty standard now - police road-blocks at all routes to the stadium to check tickets at least a couple of times as the crowd gets closer to the stadium (say 500y and 100 yards from the gates), so that only those with tickets for that stand get close to that gate. That's pretty standard behaviour now on big matches like this one. The other issue seems to be that it looks like there were counterfeit tickets, so again, there needs to the ability to spot those before you even get close to the stadium.

A game like Argentina-Colombia should have been a 'priority one' game for the authorities. It was was bound to have security challenges. And yet they seem to have treated it like a normal Dolphins game.
 
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