Hello and welcome to the fourth episode at The Totally Football Show presents Zonal Marking.

And this, you'll probably already know by now, is our six-part summer series to coincide with the release of Zonal Marking.

A book written by our very own Michael Cox. Hello, Michael. Hi, Ian. Michael, what's the full title of the book? It's Zonal Marking, The Making of Modern European Football. It certainly is. It's out already. You can read it right now, and I highly recommend you do. It's very, very good. In a nutshell, for anyone who hasn't listened to one of these, what is it?

It's a book about the difference in style between Europe's major footballing countries.

Yes, it's all of that and more. It's like a history gap filler, I think.

Nice.

If there's little bits that you didn't know about, it fills in the gap, much the same way that the mixer did, I thought, but for the Premier League. Excellent. Get them as a pair. We're joined by Tom Williams, and we're going to be discussing Jose Marino's European Cup-winning Porto Sider 2004. Hello, Tom. Hello, Ian. You must remember that Marino-Porto side very well.

I do.

I just remember how iconoclastic Marino was, and it's hard to think now, but there was a time before

Joseo Marino had come into our lives.

And that first season, which was the 0304 season that we're going to talk about in some detail,

was the season when he sort of exploded across the European football consciousness. And it was like nothing I've ever seen

before. So yeah, very vivid memories of that season. Yeah, it was exciting. We hadn't tired of it.

But it wasn't that it galvanized Portuguese football so much, because Portuguese football was already

in a good place, wasn't it, Michael?

Yeah, it was. I mean, regardless of what was happening with Porto, they were hosting the European

championships that summer and that was a really big deal for Portuguese football, particularly

because they'd seen off the rival bit of Spain to get the hosting to that tournament. Portugal

proposed a joint bid with Spain. Spain rejected it to go it alone

and then Portugal beat them. And until I was researching the book, I didn't realize what a big

thing that was for Portuguese football and for Portugal as a country. Obviously, Spain is their only

neighbours and massive rivals. So there was that, there was the rise of Porto. We had the gradual rise of Christiana Ronaldo,

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