France Euro 2016 Review: A win for negative football

Let's just go for a quick review of the euros. It's been a few weeks and now the dust has settled, have we forgiven England? Of course not. But what else did we learn?

I'm focusing on the major players here. We learnt that you really can't win anything with Giroud. We learnt that Ozil can't take a penalty and unfortunately negative football triumphed.

Lets begin with England and what is the poorest performance I have ever witnessed from an England team. First i'll make the only case you can that defends Roy Hodgson and that is that his players let him down. 90% of our players could have given more, could have covered more blades of grass, could have run faster, tackled quicker and performed better. However, Hodgson made some of the worst managerial decisions, in that tournament, that I have ever seen. He finally decided to play 4-3-3 and only brought 2 wingers. He played Raheem Sterling off the back of a poor season and a poor tournament. He thought Wilshere playing in a deep midfield position was somehow an improvement on Dier. He ended a game with four out and out strikers on the pitch. He dominated a game for 78 minutes and decided to start playing defensively. The list goes on and on and on, it really does. I can't actually just sit here and list it all. Perhaps another article (or video)

Hodgson wasn't the only manager who under performed at the Euro's. Deschamps did too. France should have won the Euro's make no mistake. Leaving out players like Lacazette in favour of Gicnac is nothing short of criminal. Not that I have proof, but I said you can't win a tournament with Giroud when I realised he was going to keep playing him. Giroud who only turned up against the teams France were much better than by the way. Three goals flatters Giroud's tournament massively. Kante should have been playing and Giroud should have been an option but Martial needed more game time. While Deshamps' formations and tactics worked for the most part, it became obvious after the final that Deschamps had carried his team there more through luck than judgement. 

And so to my main point. It was a negative brand of football that ultimately triumphed in this tournament. This was a poor tournament. There was low quality in most matches. Very few goals were scored, very few goals of quality were scored. Players didn't seem to play at pace. Teams seemed scared to advance too often for fear of getting caught. Portugal were nothing short of an abomination to watch in many of their matches. Yet they took home the title and to me, that is a bad thing. 

Many people support their club or their country just to see them win and I can't imagine a more nonsensical logic base than that. If that is the case go and play Pro Evo on 1 star, pick a team and have the time of your life. Want more of the atmosphere? Go and support Celtic. 

You are not there to watch your team win. You are their to witness football, the beautiful game. You need to be entertained. Of course you want the euphoria of a victory but please don't waste your life blindly following your clubs decisions. Analyse them, assess them. It is your right, as a fan.

Not only do we give money to football but we give time. We give that time because we want to feel joy. Not moments of joy but we want to enjoy. How can you enjoy 11 men pass the ball for 90 minutes. There is no drama, there is no purpose, there are no wow moments, no heart in mouth moments.

If we accept this, if we write articles saying Portugal deserved it. 'They played well', then negative football wins. The game will breed players who are great at defending. Football will move backwards as creativity is replaced in favour of structure. Don't get me wrong, these things are importnant but shouldn't someone on £100,000 a week be able to do both?

The irony is that had teams gone for it against Portugal, had they have really tried to play through them. Portugal could have picked them off, and if they had where would we be? Anywhere different? No, not at all. The difference would be, Portugal might have looked good for their wins. They would have played fast counter attacking football. This I can live with.

You can argue a team with a weaker squad owes it to itself to play to it's strengths and occasionally fairytales do happen. Chelsea winning the Champions league, Greece winning the Euro's even Leicester winning the Premier League. However, there is a difference between park the bus football and negative football. Portugal never got that lead they needed to hang on to, they simply never went for that win. They denied the paying customer an opportunity to see what they had paid for. If we pretend this is okay. Then we will pay for it again.