EURO 2008 INFO

If, first up, it was Andorra against Liechtenstein, I could understand. If the next month was to be spent watching earnest part-timers from San Marino huffing and puffing their way through 90 minutes with Luxembourg, the feelings of ennui would make sense.

Life is too short to drink bad wine and it is certainly too short to watch bad football. Yet we do, week in and week out. We traipse off to substandard affairs, or games that we know, by the end of the season, will have had no relevance or impact beyond another fixture fulfilled, another Saturday gone by.

Yet by the time this coming weekend is out, we could have watched matches featuring Cristiano Ronaldo, Ricardo Quaresma, Deco, Nani, Nihat Kahveci, Tranquillo Barnetta, Luka Modric, Petr Cech and Michael Ballack, and each one will be relevant. And this, remember, is widely agreed to be a competition that is getting off to a relatively slow start. By Monday, when Holland walk out to play Italy in Berne and France face Romania in Zurich, the 2008 European Championship will be going like the clappers. What is not to like?

There is no pleasing some people. We spend all winter carping like hell about English footballers, how they lack the technique and vision of the continental players, how our game is unsophisticated and knows only one way of playing, bemoaning the fact that there is no English equivalent of Ronaldo, Fernando Torres or Franck Ribéry, and then along comes a competition that combines all of those players and their finest qualities - the individuality, the flair, the cat-and-mouse tactical exchanges - and suddenly we are not so sure. Why? Because there are no English players involved. Make your minds up, for heaven's sake.

It boils down to a simple question, really. Do you like football, or not? And by football I do not mean the way we increasingly choose to interact with the sport in this country; by developing a parochial obsession with one team at the expense of all reason and combining a pathological hatred of a local rival with an intellect-sapping devotion to whichever group of mercenaries and ungrateful slouches happens to be passing through wearing the shirt.

I mean old-school football, the first you watched, when there was nothing more resting on it than the pleasure of seeing 22 men trying to play a game with beauty and it did not really matter who won as long as the way in which they did it was exciting and pleasing to the eye. The football, and footballers, of your youth, when attempted imitation over the park was the sincerest form of appreciation.

It is strange that a tournament without England is viewed with such suspicion when this season has largely been spent marvelling at the brilliance of Ronaldo in a Manchester United shirt. This month he will play in a Portugal shirt. And unless you are a United fan, what difference does that make? He is still the same player, still capable of delightful trickery, explosive free kicks, still the same boy wonder with a ball at his feet. So sit back and enjoy it. What is stopping you?

It was the marketing department that came up with the concept of the match-day experience and somewhere along the line we took its bait above the uncomplicated joy of watching a game for nothing more than the fun of it. I once sat with business people who were planning a Premier League Hall of Fame in London and was shocked, naively, to discover that the whole project was geared to getting visitors to drop an additional 25 quid per head, over the admission fee, on refreshments and sundry trinkets.

This is why we now exit most museums via the gift shop and modern airports have a time-consuming shopping mall between security and departure gate. Going to a game on Saturday is all part of modern commercialism. It is an event, replete with vast club shops stocking a hundred forms of apparel, fancy catering and glossy souvenir programmes costing what was once the price of a ticket. There are family sections and singing sections, corporate boxes and Marco Pierre White cooking up a storm on site, so is it any wonder that when required to appreciate a game on its merits, in low-key surroundings, so many are confused about how to feel.

Many were not in love with football, anyway. They were in love with affixing a St George's Cross to the car aerial, buying the new red England shirt and joining a gang for a month; all the stuff that is around football, but not about it.

Those old-fashioned souls who just liked seeing a good match have lost a foothold in our modern game. Strictly enforced segregation and so few leading clubs accepting a walk-up on the day have put paid to that dinosaur - the neutral fan, the chap who would watch the best match in his area just for the pleasure of seeing good players play.

This is not meant as a criticism of the partisan supporter, more an acknowledgement that as football has grown ever more tribal, the rules of engagement have changed. We are out of the habit of appreciating a game, rather than the rigmarole of attending a game to cheer for one side. Now, faced with a tournament that can only be enjoyed for its own sake, we seem unsure what to do.

We crave the partisan edge that replicates the emotion of following our club. We hate English failure, yet cannot savour a tournament without it. That is why newspapers have been full of articles on who to support. We must have an allegiance. We are fearful of leaving it to chance, tuning in with no more sustenance than the faint hope that the best team win and the odd xenophobic grudge against the Germans. We would rather not watch. What a shame.

Some of the greatest matches I have seen have been internationals with no English involvement. Spain 2, Nigeria 3 in Nantes during the 1998 World Cup, when Spain led twice only to be beaten by a goal by Sunday Oliseh 12 minutes from time. Italy's 2-0 extra-time win over Germany, the hosts, in the 2006 World Cup semi-final in Dortmund; Holland going two goals up against the Czech Republic at Euro 2004 and losing 3-2. And a quite brilliant match, believe it or not, between Mexico and Bulgaria at the World Cup in 1994, which was stopped in its tracks when a halfwit referee from Syria called Jamal Al Sharif sent off one player from each side early in the second half, meaning nobody dared put in a tackle thereafter.

There will be plenty that I have forgotten and many that were stunning but were only glimpsed in a bar on television, such as Spain's 4-3 win over Yugoslavia at Euro 2000.

I will travel to Austria and Switzerland with equally high hopes because any tournament that pits Holland against Italy, France against Romania, Spain against Russia, the Czech Republic against Portugal, Croatia against Germany, Holland against France and Romania against Italy in the space of five days has more than a little going for it. And this is merely the group stage, remember. It gets better in the knockout. Who to shout for? Let the game unfold. There will be one side who deserve it more. Cheer for them. If you like football, you'll always end up with a team.

Yes, it would have been lovely for England to be there, but is Euro 2008 now a turn-off? No way. The 1994 World Cup was full of wonderful surprises, such as Bulgaria beating Germany in New Jersey, and it developed an energy of its own in this country, long before our Premier League was the most international in the world. In many ways, it was the 1994 tournament that was the starting point for the globalisation of the English game. It captured imaginations, not least when Alan Sugar, the former Tottenham Hotspur chairman, brought Jürgen Klinsmann, the Germany striker, and two Romanians, Ilie Dumitrescu and Gheorghe Popescu, to White Hart Lane soon after. Now, it is as if we are sated. Yet surely, 14 years on, a Tottenham fan will be just as interested in how Modric, the new signing, fares for Croatia.

The point is, with this tournament, English football is represented, but in a slightly different form. More Arsenal players get in the Switzerland squad than are available for England. There are four Liverpool players turning up for Spain, as opposed to the two that reported for England duty in May. And even if half of your squad is not decamping to a lakeside or mountain-top headquarters, is there not a pull in seeing the game played properly for a change? “Oh, so that is what it is supposed to look like,” as a female friend of mine observed, when watching Brazil at a long-distant World Cup. “It's quite good, football, isn't it?”