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Round of 16

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vintage-toffees said:
Can’t remember a tournament as underwhelming as this has been some great players but none compare to some of the greats gone bye
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Tournaments get worse as you age.

The biggest problem for me is that every single game looks the same. The tournament is in Germany but it really could be anywhere and it does my head in. Boring sanitized crap. (and I don't even think its been THAT bad of a tournament so far).

There is no magic in football any more.
 
Martin Alvito said:
VAR chalking goals off for things like fouls in the buildup and dead-level offsides means concessions are harder to pull back, relative to when those goals stood. This pushes the big sides toward negative football when they play one another.
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I don’t think this is a new phenomenon. Or at least that new.
 
Drico said:
In theory, at least, it should lead to better quality - more evenly matched sides of a higher calibre in the group stages. What we see at the moment is an elongated preliminary competition to rid us of 8 minnows - and when the big boys eventually play they knock themselves out quickly.

That said, you will sometimes get duff tournaments no matter how small the finals tournament - Euro 80 and Euro 96 were stinkers with probably only two genuine classic matches among them - but Euro 84 and Euro 2000 were sensational. Euro 88, Euro 2004, Euro 2008, and Euro 2012 were all excellent. Euro 92, less so. I think football in the 90s was fairly grim, actually, so I don't think we can only blame formats in that era.
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I don’t really think your first paragraph describes how this group stage went
 

There hasn't been exactly a plethora of exciting, goal laden, end to end close matches. The quality has all just been a little bit poo.
 
Can see Belgium knicking a goal and going through France need to score soon Belgium will get a chance at some point and punish them despite the dominance
 

TheBigIguana said:
I don’t really think your first paragraph describes how this group stage went
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Oh, I think it does. Very adequately. It's a festival of football and all that - and it's lovely for the smaller countries to have their moment - but most of these matches are largely meaningless in an historic context. They should be - and in the past were - qualifiers. Leave the finals tournament to the best 8-16 sides who have made it through.

In the past, qualifiers used to have meaning. England v. Denmark 1983 was an historic qualifier, for example. These were huge games because the prize was big and the standard high. One place to fight over. Now, they have to invent the Nations League to give countries like England something to do when smaller nations are fighting for some Nations League route to the big show during qualification. It's a farce. They have destroyed the qualification competition and the finals tournament - and all for money.

I realise this is an old man shaking his fist at the clouds rant, but it's no less true for all of that.
 

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