FACES. Television is good at capturing them. This was a week of some striking faces, faces that will haunt us. There may be no substitute for "being there" but, on the plus side, television gets close and lets us see what's going on in people's faces. And what a lot was going on this week at Euro `96.

Above all, there was the face of Stuart Pearce. Strained, pumped, driven. What an eyeball-popping explosion of emotion when the ball hit the net from that penalty. In an instant, we glimpsed the pain of six years being lifted and gained some insight into the pressures these players live under.

Alan Hansen summed it up memorably when he said that, if you were in the trenches, Pearce was "the first man you would send over the top and, if you were in the opposition trenches and saw him coming, the first thing you'd do is put up the white flag".

And then afterwards, when being interviewed, what was striking was Pearce's pallor and how he looked almost fragile. The contrast with the "Psycho" of earlier was remarkable. What was going through his mind when taking the kick? "All I could see was my wife saying `oh no, not you again'." Human, after all.

We saw another tormented face earlier in the week, that of Arrigo Sacchi. For him, there was to be no release. It was almost cruel the way the cameras kept returning to his face over that topsy-turvy 90 minutes at Old Trafford on Wednesday. For all the manic expressions, the frantic gestures and the impassioned speech, the image that will linger is, of the taut lips and clenched teeth after Gianfranco Zola's missed penalty. The attempt to hide revealed far more than it hid.

Then there was Clarence Seedorf. One of the saddest sights of the tournament was of Seedorf, having missed the penalty that cost Holland a semi-final place, walking back to the halfway line alone, with no team-mate coming to offer him consolation. Jimmy Hill had spoken earlier, during the England-Spain shoot-out, of his hope that there would be "no villain - or anyone seen in that guise". In that moment, the Dutch team stood indicted as the villains of the day.

THEY were playing Elgar. "Pomp and circumstance in the land of hope and glory," declared Barry Davis momentously at the start of the BBC's coverage of the England-Spain game, and one feared that most of the pomp was going to come from the commentary booth. To be fair, however, the coverage was reasonably restrained, particularly given the outcome.

In fact, it was, in many ways, an occasion when we saw the best and worst of the British. To start with, the game was played in a remarkably happy, carnival-type atmosphere and the BBC devoted a lot of time to successfully conveying that sense of occasion. Davis hit the nail on the head when he said the "atmosphere was joyous," and it was certainly delightfully free of the threatening resonances usually associated with English supporters.

The commentators and analysts were also refreshingly free of the arrogance and triumphalism so often associated with English (and dare I say it, Irish) success. Hansen, Jimmy Hill and Ruud Gullit all acknowledged that Spain had been better over the 120 minutes (isn't it funny how often the better team loses the shoot-out) and Gullit, refusing to be intimidated by the circumstances, declared baldly, in that simple way of his, that "England really deserve to go out".

As far as the occasion went, however, things started to go downhill when Sergi was booed for the entire second half and during extra-time, for having the cheek to go down after a dangerous tackle from Gary Neville. Neville received all the sympathy, but no one seemed to question the coincidence of this tackle happening immediately after a first half in which Sergi had been the outstanding player.

Things reached their nadir with the cacophony of boos and whistles that greeted the Spanish penaltytakers. Is the fun-loving English fan merely a creature of success? Wednesday may tell us.

SOCCER. There are so many systems to play. Which one do you choose? For Euro `96, ITV seem to favour route one, RTE, the slow build-up, and the BBC, total football.

The BBC's total football is not without its failings, but it is the most entertaining to watch. The constant inter-changing, interruptions and general banter between Hansen, Gullit and Lynam sometimes gets in the way of serious analysis, but at least it comes closest to reproducing a genuine discussion on the game. Play flows where it will and we, the spectators, are the beneficiaries.

On RTE, Giles is good at slowing down the tempo of the game in midfield, but the game often gets bogged down there ("could you just run it back there, please") and the lack of convincing flank players in this tournament gives him no outlet.

On ITV, everything goes through the goalkeeper, Wilson. A question is played direct to one player, comes straight back and then they start again. Creativity is apparently forbidden. It can truly be said that the brightest thing about their coverage is John Barnes's jacket.