Euro 2012 a big draw in more ways than one

Perhaps all draws should be like this.  Maybe all we need to liven up the NCEL League Cup draw is Zinedine Zidane and Marco van Basten drawing out balls between monumentally pointless interludes pertaining to local culture.  “Lincoln Moorlands Railway… will play… Glasshoughton Welfare.  Now, here’s the Crigglestone Colliery Band playing ‘Our Lass Is A Yorkshire Lass’.”

Draws are rather like opening ceremonies; pompous, overblown and, in more ways than one, drawn out.  Perhaps I’ve become cynical but once you’ve seen one African woman in a massive headdress surrounded by schoolchildren re-enacting the dawn of time, you’ve seen them all.

Once the interminable faffery had subsided, we were treated to something dimly resembling the Euro 2012 draw.  Time taken in total: almost an hour.  Rudimentary experiments in your humble author’s study involving an ice-cream tub and some scissors have proven beyond doubt that the whole thing can be done in just under four minutes.

After a fashion, the draw threw up some mouth-watering group stage clashes; though, in reality, it was always going to.  The thing about the Euros is that good sides are crammed together more densely than in a World Cup and the major footballing nations are not all in the same pot of seeds.

So we have Germany v Portugal, Spain v Italy, France v England and Holland v Germany, all in the first six days of the championship.  By comparison, the highlight of the opening six days of the World Cup in 2010 was probably Uruguay v France.

The Euros have, for some time, been considered the highest quality tournament in football, and quite possibly all sport.  The last three tournaments have been of a consistently high quality, whereas the last three World Cups have been relatively disappointing (though not without drama).

The tournament throws up more of the international game’s major rivalries, which gives the early stages of the competition an intensity that the World Cup group stages sometimes lack.  Goalscoring rates, too, have been consistently higher in the Euros than the World Cups of the twenty-first century.

The Euro 2012 draw was helped by the fact that two lesser sides, co-hosts Poland and Ukraine, were automatically seeded, pushing Germany and Italy down into Pot 2.  Group A will be a curiosity, with arguably the worst team from each of the four seeding pots drawn together.  Yet what treats lie elsewhere.

For their part, England are in a relatively manageable Group D, in which they will face France, Sweden and finally Ukraine.  Their cause was helped this week by UEFA’s sensible decision to finally apply the laws of precedent to Wayne Rooney’s absurdly harsh three-match ban, with the Manchester United forward now able to play in the last group game against the co-hosts in Donetsk.

Yet every team at the Euros will be competitive.  In the main, the right fourteen teams came through the qualifying competition, with Turkey and Serbia the biggest absentees.  This is not bad news for England, who have no games against somebody like Algeria, and are in no danger of underestimating the task ahead of them.  England simply weren’t up for the game in Cape Town; there is little danger of complacency next summer.