Seems Italy was team for this Euro2016.

Seems Italy was team for this Euro2016 and loses on shootout vs Germany 1-1 Italy (6-5 pens): Euro 2016 quarter-final – as it happened.

The European Championship has at last woken up. With Germany against Slovakia and Italy against Spain, there have at last been two performances worthy of the stage. After two weeks, the tournament has finally begun. It’s almost as though 16 teams was the right size for the tournament all along.

“The group stage was a little bit strange, because Uefa did some stupid things with the system,” Lukas Podolski said. “You lose the first two games and you still have a chance to get through to the next round. So it is a bit confused but for us, it doesn’t matter. Now the tournament starts.”

Some perhaps would dismiss it as German arrogance but Podolski is right: the change to the format has led to a fortnight of largely unexciting, largely pointlessfootball. International football has been struggling anyway for two to three decades to keep up with the club game: wilfully creating non-spectacles like this helps no one.

The counter-argument is the performances of Wales and Iceland, both in the quarter-finals on merit, the sort of underdog stories that enliven a tournament and refresh the spirit. Their successes, though, should not obscure just how bad much of the football in the first couple of weeks of the tournament was, how unambitious, how lacking in guile or invention or quality. And it is perhaps important not to assume that both are at Euro 2016 only because of the expansion to 24 teams.

Whenever complaints are raised about the bloating of the World Cup or the Euros, there comes a response that is both patronising to the smaller sides and seems to miss the point of what a tournament is: that it’s somehow healthy for everybody to get a go, that it’s important not to create a closed shop, that everybody has a right to be there. Perhaps we could have an egg-and-spoon race as well for those who nearly qualified. The result of such woolliness is mediocrity under the banner of inclusivity.

Everybody has a right to try to qualify and if they’re good enough they will (there is an issue with the way the seedings work which risks making failure self-perpetuating, but that’s a different issue).

Look at qualifying this time. Five sides finished having come third in their groups – Turkey and then, through the play-offs, Ireland, Hungary, Ukraine and Sweden. With all due respect to Ireland’s victory against an Italy side whose performance against Spain showed how little they’d cared in that final group game, would any of them really have been missed by anybody other than bar-owners and TV crews desperate for colourful fans anticking drunkenly? 

Hungary were well organised and smart enough to pick off a dismal Austria but their fundamental lack of quality was highlighted by the 4-0 defeat against a Belgium side that still looks more like a collection of individuals than a team.

Lose three more of the sides who qualified in second – Albania and Romania had the poorest records plus (trying to allow for the fact that certain sides having already qualified eased off) Russia – and that leaves 15 of the 16 sides who made it through the group (Hungary for Austria the only difference). In other words, the less fancied teams who have impressed would have qualified anyway. They have done well because they have been good sides for a couple of years; it’s not some miracle that struck just before the tournament itself.

Pit two sides of differing abilities against each other and, inevitably, the weaker one defends. They should defend. It is their duty to defend. That’s how they can get the best possible result out of the game. That’s true at club level as well – although the variation in quality tends to be less defined. The difference at international level is that attacking structures are less well-defined.

Defences vary little. Most sides, once their initial press is done, settle back to a system with two banks of four. Sometimes there’s an extra player in one bank or other and sometimes there’s a player between the banks, but the principles do not differ radically from one team to another. Players coming from clubs to the national team can adapt relatively quickly.