Hello and welcome to the Tifo Football Podcast. I'm Joe Devine and I'm delighted now to be joined by Seb Stafford Bloor.

Hello, Joe Devine. Hi there. How are you? I'm very well. Over-eaten. I'm tired. I feel full,

lethargic, sluggish. Sure. But one more, one more podcast. It was a big day of football, wasn't it?

J.J. Ball the Bullard. Yeah, it was good. I really enjoyed it today. I had a great time watching all the football. And, yeah, good goals, good time had by all. It really was. It was a really good time had by me and by everyone else that was here. We loved the game. Do you know what I loved about it most? Um, the goals. It was the jeopardy. It was the, apparently, according to the TV commentary, Portugal's position was every one of one to four in that group during the game, the game process, the game state there this evening. Oh, you can't ask for more stakes than that, unless you're at an outback steakhouse. I think you can ask for as many as you want. They've got a kitchen full, haven't they? But other than that, outside of the steakhouse, it's the Euros. You know where else you can get loads of good stuff in a row? It's the athletic. If you visit Theathletic.com forward slash Tifo football, I guarantee you you will find some of the best writing about football and indeed other sports on the internet from writers such as Raffaughnigstein, James McNicholas, James Horncastle, David Ornstein. The list is almost never ending of fantastic writers. And you can get a 30-day free trial if you try The Athletic out now by visiting theathletic.com forward slash Tifo. That's theathletic.com forward slash Tifo. But enough of this. Now we're going to get into the meat of today's episode. We're going to be talking about France, Portugal, Germany, Hungary, Spain, Sweden, Poland and Slovakia,

and also what happens next in the round of 16?

Because we now know who's going to face who in the knockout stages,

and that's very exciting because there are a couple of top-class clashes.

So we'll come to that a little bit later on.

But for now, I will say I'll leave you in the warm hands

and the cool embrace

of Sep Stafferblor and JJ Bull the bullet.

Okay, let us begin today's episode with discussion. We will come to Germany, which was in some cases the more interesting part of the day. But we're going to talk first about France versus Portugal. It was France two, to Portugal. And the first thing I wanted to say, J-J, Joe, interesting game to watch. Most interesting thing for me was from the beginning because both teams tweak their setups pretty rigidly, in some cases. Lots in the midfield. Portugal had a two

in previous games, moved through with three. France had a three went the opposite way. Rabio out

for Toliso will come to that. But let's start with Portugal dropping Bruno Fernandez, because that

felt like a very big decision, which actually, you have to say, paid off in the game.

Well, I think the reason they did that is because these two teams have played each other over the last however long, maybe a year or so. And they've been one goal in the two games, it was very scrappy, Ngolo Canty goal, prolific in Golokanti. I mean, you can't tell everything just from that, but you kind of can. It was very tight. Yeah. Excuse me. It's very tight, very equal in the games. And so I think they both expected a similar match pretty much because of where they were in the group, perhaps. Yeah. Either way. No one was expecting Hungary to be leading in Munich for most of the evening, right? So I think Portugal and France probably both felt that they were safe going into the game.

Probably. I don't think either of them didn't want to win or anything like that. They weren't just playing for a draw, but they want to be as safe as they can. Minimize risk. Now, one of the things you get with Bruno Fernandez, as good a player as he is, he, his past completion rates, if we're going into that sort of stats, is not as high as certain other attacking midfielders because he tries a lot of things to make a lot of things happen.

So he'll be quite low in games.

Say he'll finish with 85%.

And it looks like, well, that's not good enough.

He should be at 90 because that's what you want to have and complete your passes. But it's because he's trying to force through balls. You're trying to force players into space. Really valuable for Manchester United, especially, and Portugal. But in this game, when you want to have control of the ball and the game, because France are so dangerous in transition, you've got Mbapé, Grisman, Benzima, Hernandez, Pogba, Canty, all of them are quick and can get up the pitch really quickly, so that's where they can hurt you. And that's what France would look to do against Portugal because of what they've played. They're going to play in transition. They know if they sit deep against them, Portugal can do the same thing to them. They've got Jogo Jota, Berno Silva, Ronaldo, all that kind of pace up top. That can exploit a single mistake. So you bring in Jamitino, who is fantastic in possession of the ball, and therefore you get greater control of the match. You don't lose the ball in silly errors because rather enforce that through the ball, he will wait the extra pass and look for the space before you get it in. Now, Ren Sanchez comes in and I thought he was superb to me. He had a great game. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there's an article in The Athletic actually. It was quite good about the rebuild of Sanchez. Jack Lang, I think. Yeah. So you might remember him from like Swansea in places like that where it didn't really go well for him and he's been at Bayern, I think, and it didn't really work out there either.

What I've read about him is that he tends to have been really good in training but can't really move that onto the pitch.

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