Euro 2012...MIN June

A bit late again. And the worst part is I have had my notes sitting on the table all week :s. Still, I am in front of the computer for the first time in 4 days so here goes...

You can probably tell that the month, for me, was all about the football.  4 weeks of 22 men playing with a ball. And, for the first week, 2 games a day, every day, which coincided perfectly with my break between nights. Needless to say, all other activities were suspended for me from 5pm onwards unless they involved a pub with the football on the telly....which a few times, it did the disadvantage of living opposite the local :p

The decorations in the pub 

I watched the matches on 3 channels...RTE 2, ITV and BBC, the latter being my preferred channel and the only one I forgot to photograph incidentally.  

Being a Brit living in Ireland, I couldn't hang my flag out the window, so I made one out of  felt that I had inherited from the bosses late Gran.

I made an Irish flag out of cardstock, then with the newly embellished Radio Times wallchart attached, I sewed the 2 together.  I am thinking of using it as a cover for a minibook for the tournament as I am loath to throw it out.

It had pride of place on the wall by my chair for the month....the boss, while he enjoys football, doesn't have the same obsession dedication that I have for the game.

Now, before I chuck some numbers at you, I better tell you that I am including the final, even though it was played on the 1st July.  It might be cheating a little but since I wanted to get the whole tournament stats in, then I guess, today, I am a cheat!

Ok, 25 games were played overall with 18 of them in the group stages. There were 16 countries involved overall.


Spain scored the most goals....12 in total, with a third of them being in the final against Italy.  Incidentally, that was the 2nd time in the tournament that those 2 countries met, the first being in the group stages where they drew 1-1.


Italy and Spain both had to go through penalty shootouts to get to the final, Spain winning 4-2 against Portugal in the semis and Italy beating England of course, like we could ever get through a tournament of any kind without having to play at penalties :( 4-2.


There were 3 red cards shown and 119 yellow cards.


6 players scored 3 goals each to get the Golden Boot...Torres, Gomez, Dzagolev, Mandazukic, Balotelli and Ronaldo.


France v England had the ball most in play during any one game -76%


England stats were: 4 games, 2 wins, 1 draw, 1 loss, 1 penalty shootout, 5 goals scored.

Spain have won 3 major tournaments in a row: Euro 2008, World Cup 2010, and this one.  They are the first country ever to do this. Iker Casillas, who plays for Spain, is also the only player ever to have played in 100 winning international games.

I guess that will do you, before I seriously bore all you non football people. I will now send you on your merry way to Julie who will tell you more about Month in Numbers for those of you who are new to this and want to join in.

And, I will leave you with my feet...well, my very patriotic Docs to be exact. yes, I wore them to the pub for the France v England game and it was very tempting to wave them in the air when we scored but I didn't, much to the relief of the boss lol







All stats taken from The Irish Sun.