yazeez

Less than 24 hours to go.

The lack of football the past few weeks has been a bit depressing, coming back home from work and putting on showsports seemed to be a ritual on Saturdays and Sundays. Watched a couple of Asian WC Qualifiers, nothing impressive, a couple of friendlies involving the Euro 2008 teams, nothing impressive also, but Euro 2008 promises something else. A lot of people will argue that the Euro Championship is stronger than the World Cup, and I agree.

Looking forward to see France do well. A mixture of old and new, hopefully that would be the spark that they need, after a pretty disappointing qualifying campaign. They have been drawn into the group of all deaths. France, Holland, Italy, and Romania.

Allez les Bleus!

Other teams that I think will do well include, the Raul-less Spain, hey, hes been there forever and they never won something, but this year might be different, too bad the team is too based on Xavi, I wanted to see Fabregas link up with Torres, that could be something spectacular. Portugal with Real Madrid bound Christiano Ronaldo, should also go all the way, having reached the semifinals of the last World Cup, and the Final of the previous Euro, they should surely build on that.

Italy, Holland, Germany, should all also do very well.

A few surprises might be in hand this year too, Turkey, Croatia, Russia, and the Czech can have a surprise or two up their sleeve.

All in all it should be a great 3 weeks of football, and I will not miss a minute of it.

Hats off to Al Jazeera, who hold the exclusive right to show this tournament in this part of the world. They got 4 channels covering the whole thing, including an ALL ENGLISH channel, with commentary and analysis of coarse, an HD Channel (too bad I dont have an HD receiver, but might get one soon if Al Jazeera promise to have more HD content next season, also hoping that Showtime would jump on the HD bandwagon before the new Premier League season. Oh and Arsene Wenger (!!!!) and Maldini are also guests on the Arabic Coverage (not sure if they will be in the English Channel), but the English Coverage is pretty good, Trevor Francis and Sam Allardyce both featuring in the studio

boy that was a long post (compared to the posts of late) I have a lot to say when it comes to football!

The tournament kicks off tommorow at 7pm with Switzerland vs. Czech Republic, and the 2nd match is at 9.45 with Portugal vs. Turkey.