Euro Zone: The excellent Ally McCoist delivers another zinger

Plenty of the big guns at Euro 2024 haven’t overly impressed their supporters thus far, England, France and the Netherlands all on the receiving end of various degrees of dog’s abuse. Belgium are on that list too, the team booed off the pitch on Wednesday by their own fans after that scoreless draw with Ukraine.

Not that manager Domenico Tedesco was making any excuses for the display. “It took one hour to come from the hotel with a police escort. The road was completely clear, but they slowed down to 20km/h. Every traffic light was red. I had two minutes to do my team talk and we had to shorten the warm-up. It’s unbelievable, unbelievable! And then there were laser pens being shone in our eyes.”

QUOTE

Clive Tyldesley (during Georgia v Portugal): “I don’t think I’ve been to a game when it hasn’t rained.”

Ally McCoist: “They’re used to rainy nights in Georgia.”

Germany storm past Denmark into quarter-finals after wild night in Dortmund

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Switzerland expose Italy’s lack of talent to dump defending champions out

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Ken Early: Nationalism takes you to peculiar places … especially at Euro 2024

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Euro Zone: Sunak v Starmer can’t compete with Georgia’s stunning victory over Portugal

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Take a bow, Mr McCoist.

WORD OF MOUTH

“We’ve got great support in the stadiums, and more than 10 million in front of their TVs. If they don’t like it, they can change the channel.”

Criticism? Didier Deschamps is not bothered.

“Spud-flogger”.

How much does the Daily Star love Gary Lineker? Not a lot.

“It was a very dull game, I thought I was better off asleep. The booing at the end woke me up. I was actually having a nice dream about us winning the tournament.”

England fan Freddie Hahn explaining why he slept through that 0-0 with Slovenia ... having paid over €600 for the trip to Germany.

Tabloid comments don’t react well to Foden going home

When it emerged on Wednesday that the reason for Phil Foden’s temporary return to England was the imminent birth of his third child, EuroZone heroically had a peak at the comments under the news on a certain English paper’s website. A flavour:

“Did soldiers in WWII get paternity leave?” “All this new man nonsense is getting too much. I thought the lad was rushing home to reverse park the family car for his wife ... now that would be understandable.” “Wimps the lot of them. Man up.” “For crying out loud, you already have two crumb crunchers, see the kid when you get home.” “Why’s he having a baby during the Euros?”

The winner? “Bit selfish, can’t she go to him?”

NUMBER: 18

The number of yellow cards shown in the game between Turkey and Czechia, the most in the history of the tournament. And there were a pair of reds too.