Euro 2016 from row Z | Somebody pull a Leicester...

Thankfully, unlike a season of Montesin’s Becky, not all is doom and gloom.

The 24-team Euro makes for a month’s football which mitigates those ugly end of season jitters (unless you’re a Milan fan, in which case you’re frantically clutching at your inhaler until the season is over).

It’s a shame the entertaining Albania got knocked out of the tournament because of an inherently stupid mechanism that, like a Russian roulette in a Macedonian crack den, first gives you feeble hopes of survival, then shoots you through the head as soon as someone’s cousin gets a luckier break.

Iceland, too, attracted the sympathies of most (especially after Ronaldo’s well-aimed yet cheap bar stool slur) by playing defensive football and lethal counterattacking – nothing Jose Mourinho hasn’t shown us in the past and won’t show us again as from next season. Then Eire and Northern Ireland, both showing off industrial quantities of grit to spectacularly qualify against the odds, the former distinguishing itself for having the best fans at the tournament. Wales, and to an extent Slovakia too, seem capable of troubling the bigger teams.

As an Easter egg, there will be a rush during the next transfer market window to sign the next Ronaldo, Messi or again if you’re a Milan fan, like me, the next Bruno N’Gotty or Kevin Constant.

Yet all this leads to me reflect on the very existence of my own favourite sport. The new trend is for teams like Germany, England, Italy, sometimes Spain – factories of talent – to lock themselves up in their little boring narcissist tacticisms, while the smaller teams have nothing to fear and play more openly. Ireland v Italy defined this schism not just in the romantic overtones of the minnow killing (maiming, maybe) the giant, but also in the cliched rhetoric of the industrious working class third division side eliminating the Premiership Primadonnas away from home.

The reasons could simply be fitness related – at the end of a long season tiredness creeps in inevitably – or else the giants know they’ve got too much to lose (pride?) and in reality, a 1-0 win brings the same points as a 6-0 win (and if you’re Maltese siding for Italy or England, it also brings home a righteous feeling of invincibility).

Perhaps UEFA should be eliminating the third best placed charade and increase the number of groups (which would mean more “minnows”) and look at ways and means of making the competition more entertaining and less bloody mathematical. Like, for example, snipers on the roof of every stadium with a licence to kill divers, SCUD missiles fired at time wasters, or the referee using pepper spray instead of foam.

For, unless a complete outsider pulls a Leicester, Euro 2016 risks going into the history books for being as boring and sanitised as an unbranded white t-shirt.