Hello and welcome everybody to The Total Soccer Show.

My name is Taylor Rockwell and joining me today to talk about our first game of the 2020 European Championship being played in 2021.

I've got two of my three co-hosts.

Ryan Bailey has decided to go and play music and be fancy in that way.

But here, steadfast in their determination to explain what went wrong for Turkey and what went

very right for Italy are up first. Graham Ruthven, I announced Graham first because he previewed

Italy. So I think he gets all the credit for this three no win. Yeah. And I think I also said,

along with a number of other people, I said that Italy were going to be quite good. And that panned out a little bit in this match. They were pretty, pretty impressive, I would say. Graham, I don't know where you are on the sort of like tournament prognostications, but I saw a lot of Italy somehow listed as a dark horse. Can Italy ever be a dark horse? Like, I know they didn't qualify for the World Cup, but they're fundamentally.

They are Italy.

No, no, you can't have Italy. That's against the rules, I'm afraid, of major soccer tournaments. You can't have Italy. Were they the second most, or the second or third most successful international team? Yeah, they're not bad. History? Yeah, you can't have them as a dark horse.

So Italy is not the dark horse.

I would say my second... team in history. Yeah, you kind of have them as a dark horse. So Italy is not the dark horse.

I would say my second co-host of the day is also not a dark horse because he's been here. He's done all the previewing. It's Joe Lowry. Joe, I can't give you the credit for Italy's win, but I also won't blame you for Turkey's loss. You know what? I'll take that. I'll operate in that little in-between zone where I didn't do anything really right,

but I didn't do anything really wrong.

I'm fine to be in that spot, Taylor. Yeah, man. You were, I would say, if you were in the Turkey Squad and you didn't do anything wrong, that put you as one of their better performers on the day. Because it started off okay, did not end up okay for them. We're going to talk about the game. First, we're going to talk about the game first we're going to talk about

the opening ceremony uh i did not watch it uh joe i don't know if you did but i do know that ryan

bailey did and mentioned to say i'm not going to be on the show today but i do need you all to talk

about the opening ceremony so i'm turning it over to graham graham your thoughts it's cruel that

ryan is not on this podcast for the opening ceremony where Bono was a floating holographic head and the edge was, it seemed to be in a different place to Bono, and Andrea Bacheli was singing in an Italian stadium.

It's just cruel that he's not here for this. But it was genuinely quite incredible.

It had a bit of everything. And I've said to you before in the chat, major soccer tournament

opening ceremonies don't tend to be that notable, particularly when compared to Olympic opening

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