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246 pages

English

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Panenka's pearl of a penalty in Belgrade, van Basten's volley of a lifetime in Munich, Gazza's agonising near-miss at Wembley: over its six decades, the UEFA European Championship has thrown up many of the most memorable stories in football lore. Now it gets the history it deserves. Euro Summits is the first full retelling of the tournament, from its tentative beginnings in the late 1950s to its elephantine expansion in the mid-2010s. Taking in the USSR's early success, the grim violence of 1968, France's cavalier feats on home soil in 1984, the sensational triumphs of no-hopers Denmark and Greece, Spain's modern-day dominance, all the way up to Portugal's shock victory in 2016, it's a panoramic portrait of an event that captures a whole continent's imagination every four years. Dramatic, detailed and teeming with compelling personalities like Michel Platini, Gunter Netzer, Hristo Stoichkov, Zinedine Zidane, Wayne Rooney and Cristiano Ronaldo, this is the complete story of a footballing event second only to the World Cup.

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Publié par	Pitch Publishing Ltd
Date de parution	03 mai 2021
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781785319303
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	1 Mo

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Spanning six decades and fifteen tournaments, Euro Summits tells the complete story of the continent s greatest sporting showpiece, from its humble 1950s beginnings in a Viennese hotel to its elephantine present-day incarnation of 24 teams. Read how:
At the dawn of the Euros, the formidable Soviets initially set the standard, before Spain handed General Franco a propaganda coup on home soil in 1964

Inspired by the talismanic G nter Netzer, West Germany sweep all before them in 1972 - but are scuppered by football s most legendary penalty four years later in Belgrade

The 1980s witness two stunning triumphs: France s team of all the talents in 1984 and Rinus Michels s Dutch masters in 1988

Eleventh-hour guests Denmark sensationally seize the moment in 1992, fuelled by Big Macs and fries

Football comes home in 1996, but a patched-up Germany grab the glory at Wembley

2000 unfolds as the greatest international tournament of the era, climaxing spectacularly as France dash the prize from Italy s hands with seconds to go

150/1 no-hopers at the outset, Greece pull off the heist of the footballing century in 2004

In an age of Iberian dominance, Spain become the first team to retain the trophy, before Portugal survive the loss of Ronaldo to overcome France in 2016

First published by Pitch Publishing, 2021
Pitch Publishing
A2 Yeoman Gate
Yeoman Way
Durrington
BN13 3QZ
www.pitchpublishing.co.uk
Jonathan O Brian, 2021
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CONTENTS
Acknowledgements
The beginning
1. 1960
2. 1964
3. 1968
4. 1972
5. 1976
6. 1980
7. 1984
8. 1988
9. 1992
10. 1996
11. 2000
12. 2004
13. 2008
14. 2012
15. 2016
Bibliography
Photos
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
THANKS, FIRST and foremost, to my wonderful wife Laura, and to my family, Brigette, Seamus, John, Colm, Caomhan, Gillian, Cyjan, Caoimhe and Radha - not forgetting Diego and Tuco. Thanks, too, to Pitch Publishing s Paul and Jane Camillin, Dean Rockett, Ivan Butler, Duncan Olner and Graham Hales, all of whom were a pleasure to work with.
Paul Howard, Maeve McLoughlin, Pat Pidgeon, Eoin O Hara, Emmanuel Kehoe, Patrick Dempsey, Dermot Crowe, George Gaskin, Gerard Crowley, Damian Corless, Garvan Grant, Donal Bradley, Johnny Mooney, Emmett O Reilly, Julian Fleming and Vincent Gribbin all provided huge encouragement along the way. I m indebted to Bojan Babi , Stephan Hattenhauer, Andy Hockley, David Melo, Maciej S omi ski and Rozanne Stevens for their translation assistance; to Justin Hughes for his invaluable help with the Netherlands-related material; and to Cris Freddi, whose World Cup book served as the main inspiration for me to do this.
Last but not least, special thanks to Michael Gibbons, who s written a couple of terrific books himself, and whose generosity of spirit made the difference when it came to getting this one into print.
Jonathan O Brien
January 2021
THE BEGINNING
THE MORNING of 2 March 1955 is a cold one in Vienna. At the newly opened headquarters of Austrian football, the Haus des sterreichischen Fu ballsports building on Mariahilfer Stra e, the besuited top brass of the eight-month-old Union des Associations Europ ennes de Football are gathering to make some big decisions.
There are plenty of things on the agenda - dates of fixtures for the European football calendar, the embryonic issue of television rights - but the main order of business is the question of whether to create a European Cup for national teams . One of the people in the room is a 65-year-old Frenchman named Gabriel Hanot, the editor of the French sports newspaper L quipe . Six months later, thanks chiefly to his efforts, the first edition of the European Cup itself will kick off with a fixture between Sporting Clube and Partizan Belgrade in Lisbon.
As the delegates file into the hall in Vienna and take their seats, one chair in the room is left conspicuously empty. Many miles to the west, in Paris, another Frenchman is lying in his sickbed, grappling with a grave illness that will kill him a matter of months later, and worsening his health further by fretting about what will happen in his physical absence from the meeting that he has worked for years to set up.
Some hours later, the gathering breaks up. On the substantive issue, the verdict is that there is no verdict.

The morning of 21 December 2015 is an even colder one in Z rich. UEFA president Michel Platini, for so many years the arrogant and untouchable dauphin of European football, has just become its most notorious pariah.
FIFA s ethics committee has scuppered Platini s future political ambitions in devastating fashion, hitting him with an eight-year ban (later reduced to six on appeal) as punishment for pocketing a seven-figure bung from the similarly disgraced Sepp Blatter. In the aftermath, Platini blusters manfully about a pure masquerade of a decision, rigged to tarnish my name by bodies I know well , but his once rocket-propelled career now lies in ruins.
Four weeks before Euro 2016 kicks off in Paris, Platini s final appeal to the Court of Arbitration for Sport in Lausanne succeeds only in getting his six-year ban cut further to four years. He formally quits as UEFA president later that day. I take note of today s decision from CAS, but I see it as a profound injustice, he says in a statement. I am resigning from my duties as UEFA president to pursue my battle in front of the Swiss courts to prove my innocence in this case. Life is always full of surprises - I am henceforth available to experience more of them.
Jacques Lambert, the head of Euro 2016 s organising committee, invites Platini to as many games as he wishes to attend. But he declines, fearing that his presence will spark another conflict with FIFA. Rather than be the ghost at the feast, he stays away from the month-long tournament. Whenever I approach the sun, like Icarus, it burns everywhere, he sighs in an interview with Le Monde . What annoys me the most is to be put in the same bag as the others. I find it shameful to be dragged through the mud. [Blatter] has a lot of charm, and I was somehow bewitched. Even if he wants to kill me politically, I still have a little affection for what we experienced together.
The extraordinary things Platini achieved at the 1984 European Championship secured him a permanent place in football s highest pantheon. At one point, he was so popular in France that it was planned to name the national stadium after him. He retorted that they would regret it if he ever became an alcoholic or got arrested for a serious crime, and it was eventually named the Stade de France.
Few parallels can be drawn between Platini s life and that of Henri Delaunay, his compatriot and long-ago predecessor as ruler of UEFA. One is a household name who won three Ballons d Or before retiring to a life of seven-star hotels, stretch limos, glitzy receptions and big dinners; the other a mild-mannered, bespectacled bureaucrat whose playing career never got out of the French amateur leagues of the 1910s, and whose time as a referee barely lasted candlelight. But without the efforts of this half-forgotten polyglot, Platini would never have had a European Championship finals to play in, a Troph e Henri Delaunay to lift, or a UEFA to take control of.
Born in June 1883 into a middle-class family in Paris, the young Delaunay would have looked on wide-eyed as football established itself as a popular pastime and spectator sport in the capital. This was part of a wider trend in which large swathes of France s middle classes, appalled by the upper-class decadence and national drift exposed by the loss of the Franco-Prussian War to Germany in 1871, gravitated towards leisure pursuits of British origin as a form of oblique protest. In Delaunay s adolescence, as he wrote years later, he idolised the early stars of French league football, those crazy lads having fun and jumping on each other, screaming happily .
In 1902, the teenage Delaunay travelled to London to attend the FA Cup Final between Southampton and Sheffield United at Crystal Palace Stadium. Swept up in the noisy crowd of 77,000, he was deeply moved by what he described as a primal scene . It instilled in him a lifelong Anglophilia which extended to smoking a pipe and acquiring the nickname Sir Henry. He also learned English, which helped to establish him on FIFA s Rules and Regulations Committee.
Delaunay soon became a sort of Gallic Jimmy Hill (though exuding more charm), tirelessly trebling up in the roles of player, referee and administrator. By 1907, aged 24, he was president of the toile des Deux Lacs club, and within a decade, he was general secretary at the Comit Fran ais Interfederale, which later became the French Football Federation. His refereeing career, however, came to a painful end during a game between AF Garenne-Doves and ES Benevolence when the ball struck him in the face, knocked out two of his teeth and caused him to swallow his whistle.
At FIFA s congress in Rome in May 1926, he declared, International football can no longer be held within the confines of the Olympi