The Last 16 comes to a conclusion.

 

As we know the continent of Europe has been a battlefield throughout the ages, the Thirty Years war, the Napoleonic wars, the Spanish civil war and both world wars started in Europe, but these are all familiar to us from a western European perspective, what happened in Eastern Europe and specifically Southeastern Europe.

To put it in a nutshell, nearly six hundred years of on and off wars between the Islamic Ottoman empire and the Christian nations of the Balkans and central Europe.

I know you are asking yourselves, what has this got to do with football?

The populations of these areas have never forgotten those times. Serbia celebrates the victory over the Ottomans in the battle of Kosovo in 1389 to this day. The Austro-Hungarians defeated the Turks twice, first in 1529 at the siege of Vienna and then with help from Poland and Lithuania in what was the turning point against the Ottoman incursions at the battle of Vienna in 1683.

This is another reason, as I mentioned in an earlier post, why there are so few Muslim immigrants in Eastern European countries, to put it bluntly, liberalism and multi culturalism has never taken hold in Eastern Europe where people hold centuries old grudges.

It is also probably another reason why Turkey has always found their requests to join the European union rebuffed.

The West does not get it, but judging by some of the recent election results they are beginning to.

As I have said before the football pitch is the modern-day battleground, The Glockenspiel bangers from Austria, have been, next to the Castanet clappers, the most entertaining team in the tournament so far, winning their group with exciting high pressure, fast paced football.

The hot bath attendants have also been involved in exciting games, a nervy 3-1 win over Georgia which so easily could have been 2-2, they scored the best/worst own goal in the tournament depending how you look at it in their defeat to CR7 and his boys. As you will in this short clip, it is unusual as Turks normally know to be very aware of what is coming at them from behind and he was in no danger here.

 

They also edged another close game against the Skodas. They seem to specialize in late goals, having scored twice in injury time at the end of the game.

I know that I prefer slices of Sacher torte and Apfel strudel over some lumps of Turkish delight and I think the Boys from Oster Reich will have too much class for the carpetbaggers to deal with

Two to look out for:

Arnautovic, grizzled pro

Guler, Turkish wonderkid

The other game today with which we conclude this round, sees one of the surprise packages of the tournament in Romania versus yet another of the disappointments in the Oranjeboom from the low countries.

The Dutch are such an enigma, the creators of total football back in the 1970’s, they have never reached the heights they should have done. There always seems to be some sort of unrest in the changing room with Dutch squads, they never seem able to weld all the fantastic talent at their disposal into an effective force. 

Once again, they have been poor, they will argue that the goal they scored against Les Bleu should not have been disallowed by a spurious offside decision, but they were outplayed by Austria and only managed a late winner against the Poles.

However, the Dutch fans have been superb as we can see here

Romania is a backwater in every sense of the term, it is probably most famous as the home of Vlad the Impaler who many say inspired the character of Count Dracula. A former member of the Soviet bloc, they had their own tinpot dictator in Ceausescu, who ran the country into the ground, to the extent that when he was overthrown in 1989 as the Soviet bloc fell apart, he was executed by firing squad for crimes of genocide by starvation of his people.

It has taken Romania, a long time to recover, but the shoots of spring are breaking through, Dacia cars originate from Romania and are very popular and their football team has brought a sense of national pride to the country at this moment in time. They destroyed Ukraine in their opening game and went on to top their group.

They have the most striking player visually in their right back with his blue hair, and the son of Gheorgie Hagi, the most famous Romanian footballer of all time, Ianis Hagi is making his mark. I’m going to be sentimental here and plump for Romania

Two to look out for:

Ratju, thinks he's a smurf

Simons lots of potential

Last night, France and Portugal advanced to set up a quarter final between the two and sent Europe to sleep as they did so, the only vaguely interesting moment being CR7 crying once again on the football field. Today should be more entertaining than yesterday was.

We now have some time off before we preview the Quarterfinals which take place on Friday and Saturday.