Rob1981

What does any of this mean? Kane vs. Slovakia is only 0.22 xG? Doesn’t this imply he only has a 1 in 5 chance of scoring the goal? Even though he headed it in literally from a yard out?

Apart from the last two, which you didn’t like either

Why don’t you list out all the big games we held a 1-0 lead at HT and went on to win? I’ll wait.

Yeah, because that has always worked out brilliantly Better to be 0-0 at HT with another gear to go up than it is to be 1-0 ahead but already digging in to defend the lead.

Decent that. If you’re not happy, you obviously don’t remember the 10-15 big games where we went 1-0 up in the first half and then spaffed away the lead.

That’s it. I’ve gone

Come on lads. Do it for these three.

Vicky McClure making fun of Scotland is the buildup content you didn’t know you needed.

BBC always with the full suits

Women’s U19 game just started on iPlayer if you need to kill the time. First group game for them against Lithuania.

Only two outcomes really. EITHER we’re European champions come bedtime. MBEs all round, Bobby Moore’s Wembley statue moved round to the car park so we can get Gareth’s up. Finally resetting the giant years of hurt clock in Trafalgar Square. OR we fall just short. It’s enough to convince the FA to hand out a bumper contract extension and a payrise, but it’s not enough to convince the doubters that he didn’t just get a lucky run to the final. So THEN we can have another few years of the same identical arguments on the forums, and when he wins Euro 2028 on home soil it will be EVEN sweeter. Basically, it’s a win-win. Just sit back and enjoy.

No nerves here. What fresh hell is this?

International managers always have their reputation defined by these fine margins. Comes down to a handful of odd moments in a couple of key games and that is how you’re remembered. A substitute scores and it looks like a masterstroke. If not, you are the guy that wasted the opportunity because you made the wrong call. When the truth is usually somewhere in the middle. For a club manager, the luck usually evens out over a 38-game season. And certainly over a tenure of 2-3 years. You generally get the reputation you deserve in the end.

“Pat Nevin: Has the Eldorado boxset”

You heard the man.

Forget Yamal, @Coulthard's Jaw is the real star of the Euros. A heroic effort

Dunno. Maybe you could make the case that the team that has had the better of the game in ET has a slight advantage going into the penalties. Either psychological, or because the other team is more tired because they have had to fight harder to stay in the game. So then... maybe having extra rest beforehand and being less knackered at the end of 120 minutes still gives you an advantage. It's hard to pull much data together on penalty shootouts because there haven't really been that many down the years... even these books on the "psychology" of penalties are based on pretty small sample sizes. I think there have still only been about 30 shootouts in the whole history of the World Cup, for example. And only three in finals where the timing of your semi final and energy levels could be something to look at.

I suppose I should have added that column to say whether the final went to ET or not. As you say, the extra day's rest probably make more difference if the final isn't settled in 90 minutes.

In a quiet moment I went right back through the history books on this... Looking at Copa America and Asian Cup and AFCON as well... at least from the point that they started playing the SFs on different days to maximise TV monies: Also shows whether the semi-finalist had to play extra time or not. Overall it's isn't that far off 50/50 if you go right back 30-40 years. But it shifts noticeably over time. Maybe fitness levels or something... I don't know. But certainly in more recent times the team with the extra 24 hours' rest definitely looks more likely to win. I was interested to hear Gareth mention the extra day's preparation time for Spain in an interview... almost as soon as he had come off the pitch after the SF it was already on his mind. I still think that is one of the things that cost us in Euro 2020. Of course people will point to the fact that we didn't attack Italy more and got the tactics wrong... but there were a few players that didn't really turn up that night and looked out of running either way. Even if we had wanted to be aggressive I don't know that everyone had the legs for it. But at least we didn't have to play ET against Netherlands in the end... that will obviously help.

I'm not sure you can say we were forced into a tempo change because we had gone behind. We conceded after only seven minutes. I think we were more aggressive from the off, and the Dutch just scored with pretty much their first counter attack. No reason why we won't start the same way on Sunday. But if it is a faster tempo again... I just hope the extra day's rest doesn't swing it in Spain's favour as the game goes on. You have to go back to WC2010 to find a WC/Euros where the winner had played in the later semi final on the second night. The last six finals have all been won by the team that played first. And if you include Women's WCs and Women's Euros... it's eleven finals in a row that have gone to the team that have had an extra 24 hours' preparation time. I don't know why this isn't talked about more... the odds of tossing a coing and getting 11 heads in a row is about 10,000 to 1

We're not counting the Women's World Cup then, when Spain beat us?

Dare to dream.

But it definitely doesn't help that most fans don't really understand what favourites means. In the context of an international tournament... favourites doesn't mean "likely to win". It means England maybe have a 15% chance of winning, whereas France/Germany/Spain/Italy/Brazil/Argentina each only have a 10%-12% chance of winning. So bascially, if you run the tournament 100 times... 85 times somebody else is still going to win. But as soon as you say "favourites" the expectation goes through the roof, even though your likelihood of actually winning is only very slightly higher.

Haha, yes. I'm sure the country would. But it might be too little too late. A lot of those same people wanted him tarred and feathered a fortnight ago because we had the audacity to draw a group game. And a lot of those same people will be screaming again in the autumn if we drop points in the Nations League. I think a lot of his enthusiasm has gone. Plus it isn't the same job as the players get older, even if the players are still the same. You come back to the stuff around man management. He has been brilliant in terms of building the culture and changing what the whole setup feels like. But another two years down the line, you aren't managing a crop of young players that are finding their feet at international level and playing at their first couple of tournaments. You are managing elite players at the peak of their careers. Players that come with attitude and egos and a heavier weight of expectation because of everything they have done at club level. You definitely saw this with Eriksson. The mood in 2006 was a lot more negative than in 2002 and 2004... even though we reached the same stage of the tournament and a lot of the players were the same. I just hope we don't see the return of the 'bad old days' of club rivalries and cliques as the players move through their careers. I think this is a danger regardless of who is in charge to be honest.