Any other recent world champions Holland can take apart?
Also, short of beating the Dutch, is there any way that Romania can advance? That would be kinda neat.

One thought: Probably the first true upset of the tournament with Croatia’s win. Germany looked strangely like England against them. It means that Austria’s final match will matter a lot despite its likely irrelevance to Austria’s prospects.

One thought from the first match: qualification form seems to matter. Russia scraped into the tournament. They had some nice touches but the gulf in quality showed. Would England have been picked apart the same way?

That has to be the theme from Les Bleus following yet another slow start to the group stages of a tournament — such a start a couple of years ago not precluding an eventual run to the final.  Since there will be more attention on Raymond Domenech’s starting selections: Anelka?  The man who somehow dodged [...]

There I was thinking that the Euro 2008 opening ceremony was the usual bizarre interpretative dance performance to which UEFA seems addicted — not even good on TV, for which the visuals seem designed — when a singer (must figure out her name) and the Basel crowd did a great job on the Swiss national [...]

A warm welcome to guest poster Joanna Walsh.
I’m reading the guide notes on the walls of the Louise Bourgeois exhibition at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. They’re annoying me. I’m seeing the exhibition with a friend. It’s always good to have someone to complain to.
“Look, here it says about how miserable she is again: ‘depression, [...]

To Desmond McGrath, adding his expertise, wit and wisdom to the AFOE mix as a guest writer for the next three weeks. Desmond is based in Budapest, Hungary, so we are getting a few forints’ worth along with all of our euros. If we’re really lucky, he’ll explain the wonders of the double-long vowel and [...]

It is reading time again here at AFOE. I am happy to invite you to read The politics of Chaos in the Middle East by Olivier Roy. If you like the world to be simple and easy to understand then you will hate The Politics of Chaos.
Olivier Roy offers his readers a descriptive overview of [...]

Last Monday morning when most of Spain’s citizens were busy watching YouTube videos or TV news coverage of Rodolfo Chiquilicuatre doing his bit of buffoonery at the Eurovision Song Contest, many readers of the English speaking financial press were hard at it peering into another video, the one of the Financial Times’ Ralph Atkins interviewing [...]

The German newspaper whose website could be better organised has a very good article about the Gurtel, Vienna’s other great boulevard, once described as the proletarian Ringstrasse. I never knew this, though:
Wobei auf dem Gürtel früher Linksverkehr herrschte, wie in England. Siegfried Tschmul, ein Wiener Jude, erinnert sich gut daran. Als er 1938, nachdem die [...]