The Euro's final is here and the two teams playing in it are maybe the ones we should have expected all along.

Welcome to this week's edition of The Late Sub.

I am your host. Claire Watkins is Thursday, July 24th.

And we're going to be talking through the last two knockout round games for England and Spain, how they've made it to the Euro's final and what we can expect,

because it's going to be a very, very good game.

Let's jump in.

So our summer of Euros soccer is almost over.

We have reached the final. And it's the final that nobody even knew

that they wanted. It has come to pass. That's right, folks. We are getting Spain versus England

round two. This is a rematch of the 2023 World Cup final, which people will remember Spain 1-1-0.

And both of these finalists have survived two rounds of absolutely bonkers knockout soccer

to get here. We're going to talk about it. Talk about some of the tendencies of both of these teams,

why either of them truly have a shot in this game on Sunday and what this sort of means for the

larger tournament. Like many knockout tournament rounds, the quarterfinals and the semifinals

of the Euros this year. Sometimes you saw clear tactics and free-flowing football and a clarity of

purpose and you saw things go to plan. And sometimes you just saw a series of increasingly unlikely events. Both

are fun in their own way. I think knockout soccer, I say this a lot. Sometimes all that matters is just

who wins and who makes it past. And it's not necessarily all that important about what it looked like or how it got

done. Certainly one of these teams is going to feel that way after

going through this tournament. But I also think that that's kind of the brilliance of knockout

soccer as well, which is even with, you know, five subs versus three, as people know it used to be

before 2020, I do think that you see sort of the ebbs and flows of the incredible psychological

...