Hello and welcome to the first episode of The Totally Football Show presents Zonal Marking.

This is a six-part summer series to coincide with the release of Zonal Marking, The Making of Modern European Football, a book written by one of our panellists, Michael Cox.

Hello.

Hi, Ian.

How are you doing?

Very well, thank you.

These are exciting times, aren't they?

We usually would think about shutting down for summer, but not this time.

Yeah, bonus content for all this time.

Bonus. Everyone loves bonus content.

There's another five of these coming over the summer. We'll be joined by a familiar

face from the Totally Football Show every week, every Thursday, to take a look at a classic

European side from the last 25 years. There will be appearances from James Horncastle,

Julian Laurent, Alvaro, Romeo, Raphael Honigstein, all coming up later in the series.

But today, we're joined by Tom Williams. Hello. Hello, Ian. How are you?

I'm very well, thanks. How are you? These are exciting times, aren't they? Aren't they just?

Yeah, let's look back at previous exciting times, because that's very much the purpose of the book, Michael. Tell us about it.

Yeah, it's essentially a kind of history of modern European football over the last 25, 30 years,

taking each major European country in turn.

Holland, Italy, France, Portugal, Spain, Germany, and then England,

and looking at the style of each country is, you know, what Spanish football is, what Italian football is, why there's differences in the culture and the

way that they play the game. So yeah, we're going to look at that through the prism of

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