By no stretch of the imagination will Euro 2016 go down in history as one of the all-time classic football tournaments.

The expansion to 24 teams made the group stage sluggish and unadventurous. And while things did improve slightly in the knock-out phase, it still took plucky underdogs Iceland and Wales to generate some genuine excitement.

Having said that, neither France nor Portugal will give a damn about the 50 games that have gone before – only tonight’s final in Paris matters now. They have a chance to get their names on the trophy and the eventual winners are all that history will ultimately remember.

France have not been entirely convincing in the tournament so far. They have performed well at times and shakily at others. Against Germany in last Thursday’s semi they were outplayed for much of the game but won thanks to a couple of uncharacteristic errors by their opponents.

Portugal, meanwhile, have been even less impressive. They hadn’t won a game in normal time until their semi-final victory over Wales and their presence in the final is almost entirely down to the fact that they ended up in the more favourable side of the draw.

But all that is pretty academic when it comes to a final when just about anything can happen. So who should win it?

Well, the smart money is all on France.

In Antoine Griezmann they have the player of the tournament so far with six goals and counting. Portugal have Cristiano Ronaldo, it has to be said, but he been nowhere near his best at Euro 2016, scoring three but missing twice as many clear-cut opportunities.

The real problem for Portugal, however, comes when you take each team’s star player out of the equation. Apart from Griezmann, France have players like Anthony Martial, Dimitri Payet, Paul Pogba, Kingsley Coman, Yohan Cabaye and Olivier Giroud. All of those are capable of winning a game for France.

Portugal, on the other hand, are clutching at straws when you take away their talismanic captain. Nani is okay and has been performing better than I expected over the past month, and youngster Renato Sanchez looks like he could be a star of the future.

After the horrific year the nation has just endured, in some ways the home team triumphing tonight would be a fitting finale to a tournament that has been played out under the shadow of terrorism

But generally speaking this is a very mediocre Portugal, uninspiring and seriously lacking in players with the skill and tenacity to change a game.

Of course, none of that means tonight’s game is a foregone conclusion. It may only take a moment of Ronaldo genius or a Renato Sanchez dribble to decide the match.

But, on paper at least, you would have to go with France, who have better momentum, better players and home advantage on their side.

And, after the horrific year the nation has just endured, in some ways the home team triumphing tonight would be a fitting finale to a tournament that has been played out under the shadow of terrorism.

Paying the penalty

I know it’s old news now, but I have to say something about that quarter-final penalty shoot-out between Italy and Germany.

There I was expecting both teams to show the world how it should be done, but instead the first few penalties was like watching England vs England.

Having said that, not even England could conjure up anything quite as unorthodox as Simone Zaza’s miss. It truly was a mindboggling penalty, especially as the poor lad was brought on specifically for the shoot out.

You’ve got to feel sorry for the player. And I plan to. Just as soon as I’ve stopped laughing…

(Oh come on Italy fans, it’s not like you lot didn’t wet yourselves when David Beckham missed. And Chris Waddle. And Stuart Pearce. And Paul Ince. And Gareth Southgate. And Darius Vassell. And Steven Gerrard. And David Batty. And Jamie Carragher. And Ashley Young. And Ashley Cole…)

So long to St Mary’s

Nothing says it is summer quite as definitively as watching the annual asset stripping exercise at Southampton Football Club.

Every year around this time, fans of the south coast club have to watch as their star players and key coaches are tempted away by the elite of the English game.

This year, manager Ronald Koeman got the ball rolling by quitting St Mary’s to take over at Everton. He was followed by Victor Wanyama, who joined Tottenham Hotspur for £11 million.

Then Liverpool splashed out £34 million on Southampton’s star striker Sadio Mane. Nobody can accuse the Anfield club of not doing their bit to maintain the annual Southampton exodus: Mane joins the likes of Adan Lallana, Dejan Lovren, Rickie Lambert and Nathaniel Clyne who have made the same switch in the past two seasons.

I can only imagine just how frustrating Saints’ fans must find this yearly ritual. If you were to put together a team made up of all the players they have sold since returning to the Premier League, you would have a side more than capable of challenging for the title. With Mauricio Pochettino as manager and Koeman as his assistant.

And the very fact that two such high-quality managers have left the club to work for Premiership rivals doesn’t help. You can rest assured their links with Southampton mean they will have more of the club’s players on their respective shopping lists.

The upshot of all this is that Southampton seem to spend every summer rebuilding and recruiting. Amazingly this hasn’t caused them too many problems so far, as their eighth, seventh and sixth place finishes in the past three years clearly indicate.

But there must come a point when they are involved in a summer rebuild too many, when dealing with another reconstruction projects leaves them struggling for top-flight survival.

That would be grossly unfair on a team whose only crime is being not quite big enough to be able to tell other clubs to keep their hands off.

Footballers acting up

With football the hot topic of the past month, it is hardly surprising sponsors used this as an opportunity to wheel out players to sell their products in a series of big-budget commercials.

But while some of these football-themed adverts have been excellent, others have been less inspiring than the Roy Hodgson Book of Tactics.

The Nike advert that featured Ronaldo, for example, was superb. A true marketing master class. The product was never in your face, the story was entertaining and the acting excellent. Yes, even Ronaldo’s.

Then, at the other extreme, you had the Manchester United squad promoting new blockbuster movie Independence Day: Resurgence. Wayne Rooney, Daley Blind, Chris Smalling and a few others pretending to be elite pilots fighting off an alien invasion.

Now, although that sounds quite entertaining, it wasn’t. Not only did it feel like an utterly contrived bit of nonsense, the players’ acting was so wooden you could make a chair out of it.

Every time one of them opened their mouth you started to hope the aliens would win just to stop them delivering any more cringeworthy lines.

The moral of this story: there is nothing wrong with using footballers to sell things, just try to keep them in unchallenging roles that don’t require acting skills of any kind.

Your say

An interesting reply to my piece about the Hand of God goal, although I am not entirely convinced it was really written by the man himself…

“It just amazes me how you can bring up such a sad explanation about England’s LOSS against MARADONA in 1986. To continue bragging about the first goal shows what a sorry English fan you are.

“It was good for you not to deny that Maradona was the best player the world has ever seen at least you were man enough to admit that. As you should supposedly know, a team should never give up until the very 90th minute but the way you are arguing shows what a sorry lot the English team has always been.

“In fact, it should be noted that had it not been for the intelligence of the Argentina team not to continue pushing after the second goal, England would have ended with a humiliating defeat on its hands.” Maradona the football GOD, e-mail.

sportscolumnist@timesofmalta.com
Twitter: @maltablade