Cav's Place

It’s been ten years since I last wrote about women’s football, but I tend to follow the major national team competitions when they’re televised here, so I’m not comparing with what I saw back then, or with the differences in the level of professionalism that I was pointing out, when I say that I was quite impressed by this year’s Euro. There is the fact that more recently even some matches from our championship started being televised and I happened to catch at least parts of a handful of them, and the level seen there might have made these matches appear even more impressive by comparison, but I hope that I managed to compare apples to apples well enough, and the discussion about our championship is an entirely different one, as is the one about our national team and its performance compared to the men’s, despite the incomparably different levels of resources and interest.
Returning to the Euro, it must really be said that women’s football shouldn’t be seen as a different sport anymore, and I made a mental note when one of our commentators corrected himself, to stress that it’s the women’s championship of football, not the championship of women’s football. And that’s how it should be, and in fact the players seemed to deal with fatigue, at the end of matches or in extra time, better than male players generally tend to. And the goalkeeping isn’t a liability anymore, not in the least, in fact, and while this isn’t exactly a new development, it’s not only that those problems with finishing that I was pointing out back then have also been sorted out, but that the competition featured quite a number of great goals and other spectacular moments. Penalties are a different matter, however… On the other hand, I find it pleasing that the players aren’t going down the path of some other sports played by both sexes and focusing on building strength, trying to reduce the gap to the men from that point of view, but are instead emphasizing tactics and finesse, which leads to those spectacular moments, and which also proves that coaches are, and need to be, particularly skilled. So, overall, I’d actually say that I enjoyed this competition more than the men’s.

Before midnight I just managed to write what’s above, minus a few edits made minutes later, but I also want to add something about the result, because I really expected Spain to run away with the trophy, and they definitely deserved it, while England did not… But I guess they once again proved that the way to win such competitions is to just scrape by every step of the way. Admittedly, in the group stage England did trash Netherlands and, unsurprisingly, Wales, but that was after a first match against France where the problem wasn’t that much that they lost, but how badly they played. At that point they seemed incapable of mounting any sort of challenge, which impression returned once they reached the knockout stage… Yet they somehow just scraped by, drawing level in just two minutes after Sweden had led 2-0 most of the match in the quarter-finals and then winning at the end of a crazy penalty shoot-out where only five of the 14 total shots were scored, then scoring the equalizer against Italy in the semi-finals in the sixth minute of injury time and winning at the end of extra time thanks to a penalty that was initially saved but then scored on the rebound, and in the final they were dominated by Spain, but managed to once again equalize, admittedly much earlier, and then yet again won on penalties, albeit more clearly, Spain scoring just one. On the other hand, Spain started by utterly impressing against Portugal and, I’d say more notably, Belgium, and then continued to have no problems until the semi-final against Germany, who quite clearly just wanted to take the match to penalties, focusing almost exclusively on defense and almost making it, but Spain eventually managed to score that winning goal in the second half of extra time. And in the final, as I said, they yet again dominated, but England had its good period, during which they managed to equalize, and then they showed that they learned from Germany and managed to hold on. It really doesn’t seem right, but it is what it is…