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The Euro 2020 Qualifiers Thread

Marty

Audere est farce
Mar 10, 2005
39,885
62,545
Think it's due to a celebration of something that they have done it this time. I don't think it will done each time.
Yeah they've already confirmed that 2024 will be hosted by Germany alone. It doesn't look like a project that will be repeated any time soon.
 

scat1620

L'espion mal fait
May 11, 2008
16,280
52,488
IMG-20191201-WA0000.jpg

IMG-20191201-WA0001.jpg
 

Saoirse

Well-Known Member
Aug 20, 2013
6,143
15,550
Think it's due to a celebration of something that they have done it this time. I don't think it will done each time.
That's just the UEFA spin. Real situation is that they'd agreed behind closed doors to hand it to Turkey, only for the Turks to withdraw in favour of a potential bid for the Olympics. They panicked and ended up with this mess.
 

Marty

Audere est farce
Mar 10, 2005
39,885
62,545
Norway v Serbia will now be played behind closed doors. Winner plays the winner of Scotland v Israel to see who qualifies of those four.

Expect a lot more of these important games to go behind closed doors in the next week, either that or the games will be called off and everything will be rescheduled or abandoned altogether.
 

Danners9

Available on a Free Transfer
Mar 30, 2004
13,998
20,756
Norway v Serbia will now be played behind closed doors. Winner plays the winner of Scotland v Israel to see who qualifies of those four.

Expect a lot more of these important games to go behind closed doors in the next week, either that or the games will be called off and everything will be rescheduled or abandoned altogether.
Delays to these games and domestic seasons will cause massive problems.

Finding a slot to hold the playoffs in between a domestic season is already difficult. If the scheduled dates aren't available, there aren't many other opportunities. If the finalists aren't, er, finalised, how do they push forward with the tournament? If the domestic seasons are all disrupted and no games at all can take place, they will have to figure out how to do get around it. If the virus is still an issue, they will have to consider delaying or even postponing Euro2020.

They could always declare the domestic seasons void, but that leads to title/UCL & EL qualification/promotion/relegation problems.

Or have everything behind closed doors. Dull, but might be the only way. Could always simulate them on FIFA, I suppose!



If the virus is going to hang around until June we all have bigger problems than football, but still.. all the planning, the finances involved, the scheduling for this and next season. Chaos.
 

Marty

Audere est farce
Mar 10, 2005
39,885
62,545
Delays to these games and domestic seasons will cause massive problems.

Finding a slot to hold the playoffs in between a domestic season is already difficult. If the scheduled dates aren't available, there aren't many other opportunities. If the finalists aren't, er, finalised, how do they push forward with the tournament? If the domestic seasons are all disrupted and no games at all can take place, they will have to figure out how to do get around it. If the virus is still an issue, they will have to consider delaying or even postponing Euro2020.

They could always declare the domestic seasons void, but that leads to title/UCL & EL qualification/promotion/relegation problems.

Or have everything behind closed doors. Dull, but might be the only way. Could always simulate them on FIFA, I suppose!



If the virus is going to hang around until June we all have bigger problems than football, but still.. all the planning, the finances involved, the scheduling for this and next season. Chaos.

Yeah I if the Euros was in a single country as per usual I'd be thinking it could still be held, but I'm seriously doubting if it'll go ahead at all with this arrangement in 12 countries.

One postponement in the playoff games now and all hell breaks loose.
 

Marty

Audere est farce
Mar 10, 2005
39,885
62,545
If they can't play the qualifiers they might go old school and toss a coin:

I bet UEFA buffs are rubbing their hands with glee at the thought of using the UEFA coefficient so they can pick and choose who they want instead of dealing with these peaky upstarts in qualifying.
 

nailsy

SC Supporter
Jul 24, 2005
30,536
46,628
I bet UEFA buffs are rubbing their hands with glee at the thought of using the UEFA coefficient so they can pick and choose who they want instead of dealing with these peaky upstarts in qualifying.

yeah, they'd probably want whoever would attract the biggest TV audience.

There's no way this goes ahead now though is there? It starts in three months and 1 day. I guess it could go ahead behind closed doors if they relocate the tournament to one country, but I'm not sure there would be much point.
 

1966

Neutral England supporter
Nov 5, 2019
134
391
Since England is my city and my club, I thought I'd share a long response I just composed to a German lad who said that he hated the English for being "so smug" and that he loved watching us drop out of tournaments. I'm sharing for the hell of it to create more England content on here and because I've never really analysed the special level of hatred many people (not here) have for the England national team before.


I think that's a bit of an injustice (only a small one) in international football fandom. Not the part about enjoying seeing us go out - I get that: I loved watching your 2018 catastrophe - but the part about us being "smug". Have you gone through a Reddit thread or the comments on a YT highlights video after any of our Euro 2020 qualifiers?

The dominant sentiment is as negative as it always has been: "we're still shit", "we'll fuck it up when it matters", "it was a friendly", "they had injuries", "they were playing their B-team", "they were only farmers", "we didn't deserve to win", "we were boring and shit"... (I could go on indefinitely, becoming increasingly specific, if I had to because I see and hear this stuff all the time, and that's just our own "fans"). These excuses come out whether we've beaten San Marino by 8 goals or we've beaten Germany to extend our 20 year run of not having lost in Germany. The number of our supporters who condescendingly self-police each other and tell anyone who gets excited about our team to "calm down" because "we're shit" is ridiculous. It's been like that for a generation now. (I like to interrogate those guys: if we're earnestly "shit", what the hell are San Marino? God help me, I love San Marino and always cheer for them in any match that's not against us, but they're not.. good)

The sentiments didn't change much at all throughout Euro 2020 qualifying even as we completely decimated our group beyond anything I've seen us do in my lifetime. We didn't have a rock-bottom group in terms of opposition strength - the Czech Republic and Kosovo are both tidy sides - but we ended with the highest goals per game of any team and it wasn't even particularly close (4.6 vs Belgium's 4.0 and Italy's 4.1). Harry Kane alone accounted for 12 goals and 5 assists in our 8 matches: breaking records for goals, goal contributions and consecutive qualifiers scored in (becoming the only player ever to score in every game of a Euro campaign).

When Kane got injured at the turn of the year, people on Twitter - and not some tiny fringe either - were actually celebrating because "Kane is shit and we might get out of the group stage without him" (fans are so fickle that Kane has genuinely gone back to being underrated). "Should've squared it to Sterling" still gets more likes to this day than most of the replies in Kane's defence. It's all bullshit, obviously, but it's par for the course when it comes to actual English people's actual attitudes towards the national team. It's mostly hate and criticism: there's no hero-worship or superiority complex.

Surely you realise that "it's coming home" is just one huge cope (precisely because it never does)? We deserve a cope after all the bad luck we've had in major tournaments over the years. The misfortune is illustrated no clearer than by our lack of success in the area of football that everyone agrees is by far the most dependent on luck. Our shootout record was the absolute worst of any nation until 2018, yet our aggregate score across all shootouts is 36-41. To have been kicked out of more than a half-dozen tournaments with an overall margin that tight is to have been cosmically cursed by the wrong random probability distribution.

Of course, often the content of what we say doesn't actually matter. A lot of people, whether they do it consciously or not, just want to interpret anything English or British as uncharitably as possible, through the lens of cognitive error. We're not a popular country. Our historical success and importance have rendered a hated nation. People don't like that we created and codified football in the first serious sense, founded the first FA, have the most popular domestic league in the world (hate for the PL and its fans causes projection onto our national team with its extreme % domestic players), spawned and/or popularised as many major international sports as every other country put together (then had the audacity to not always suck at them and occasionally win top honours); we also had the most "successful" empire, we "took their islands", incidentally used our cultural hegemony to push English as the global lingua franca, have "guilt" by association with America (many - not incorrectly - view us as their toy poodle), have all of our historical misdeeds writ large and hammered into everyone's heads at school as the ultimate imperialistic evil (often leaving as footnotes identical empires throughout Europe that differed only in size); we cooperated heavily in such classic military blunders as Iraq War '03 (despite a million of us marching in protest of it at the time), we voted Brexit, and our "lads on tour" tourists are the worst in the world (I genuinely apologise for that one -- I hate it). There are a million other things that nobody alive today had anything to do with and a million more that only our aristocracy ever had any control over. I'm still a proud Englishman and proud Briton, but I have the self-awareness to understand why we're hated worldwide, regardless of how valid (or not) those feelings are (especially in relation to today's Britain).

Anyway, I know this is an effort-post in response to a throwaway comment but I'm tired of this misconception that actual people in England perceive our team as anything more than good. It's our media that goes into overdrive and I'd hope that anyone could empathise with the idea that a country's national media doesn't accurately represent its laypeople's opinions (can anyone honestly say theirs does?). We get the rough end of it, however, because far more people can interact with our large public English-language media than can with that of any other major footballing nation, which causes many cognitive effects and biases: availability bias based on prominence, confirmation bias across borders whose only common language is English or within borders where there's a lot of variance in the standard of English, translation errors, "Chinese whispers" transmission errors in which many people hear third-/fourth-/nth-hand information and received "wisdom", distillation errors that frequently co-occur with the last set, and so on.

I really don't feel like we deserve any special level of contempt in the football world, beyond our permanent status as a major-nation rival, but we get it in abundance anyway.
 

Marty

Audere est farce
Mar 10, 2005
39,885
62,545
Norway v Serbia will not be played in Norway due to the quarantine restrictions in place. The same goes for several other countries thst were preparing to play the playoffs.

The UEFA videolink conference on Tuesday will move the Euros to next year and cancel all European fixtures for the rest of the season, I'm absolutely sure of it.
 

Marty

Audere est farce
Mar 10, 2005
39,885
62,545
Thought the qualification for Euro 2020 was over? Nah. Tomorrow sees the playoff semi finals that should've been played in March finally take place, with the finals on the 12th of November.

One winner from each of groups A, B, C and D qualify for the Euros, so from Group D we will see one of Georgia, Belarus, North Macedonia and Kosovo in the tournament proper.

Group B throws up the possibility of a Northern Ireland - Republic of Ireland final in Belfast which would be the game of the century - if not all time - on the island.

Group C has Norway and Scotland which is of much interest to several people on this site, myself included. Serbia probably slight favourites but Norway's home advantage (in both games should they win) should count in their favour. Added footnote, the winner of this group will play England in the group stage and if Scotland win the game will be staged in Glasgow.

Group A is just a bit shit.

Qualifiers.PNG
 

TheChosenOne

A dislike or neg rep = fat fingers
Dec 13, 2005
47,870
49,700
Thought the qualification for Euro 2020 was over? Nah. Tomorrow sees the playoff semi finals that should've been played in March finally take place, with the finals on the 12th of November.

One winner from each of groups A, B, C and D qualify for the Euros, so from Group D we will see one of Georgia, Belarus, North Macedonia and Kosovo in the tournament proper.

Group B throws up the possibility of a Northern Ireland - Republic of Ireland final in Belfast which would be the game of the century - if not all time - on the island.

Group C has Norway and Scotland which is of much interest to several people on this site, myself included. Serbia probably slight favourites but Norway's home advantage (in both games should they win) should count in their favour. Added footnote, the winner of this group will play England in the group stage and if Scotland win the game will be staged in Glasgow.

Group A is just a bit shit.

View attachment 75597


Nice one Mart.. I was just about going to go looking for this, you have saved me the pleasure..... ?
 

Yid-ol

Just-outside Edinburgh
Jan 16, 2006
31,097
19,275
Also people who were watching in the pubs will now have been kicked out :LOL:
 

HildoSpur

Likes Erik Lamela, deal with it.
Oct 1, 2005
8,958
28,085
Fuck has Doherty done his hammy? EDIT: no its looks like he is ok
 
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