Toepoke

Great story how he grew up an 1860 Munich fan and was set to sign for them, when one of their players smacked him in the face during an under 14s game. Which prompted him to sign for the city's lesser team Bayern instead, with obvious long term consequences! Die Ohrfeige "The Slap" is this regarded as a significant moment in German football history. Ironically the chap who hit the Kaiser was called King (Gerhard König).

BST yes. Saturday teatime.

RIP Annie 🙁

Assuming they win their group, Dusseldorf on 6th July.

I'll temper this optimism by saying we are currently bookies' favourites to finish bottom of the group 🫣 (Admittedly the odds are tight between, Switzerland, Hungary and us).

From that table the most likely outcome (5 possible permutations) is that if we qualify in 3rd place we will play 1F (probably Portugal) in Frankfurt.

I agree the 16 team Euros was a better format but much harder to qualify for. With 24 teams you could have a format where the best 4 group winners get a bye to the quarter finals, that would encourage teams to rack up the goals. The remaining 2 group winners and 6 runners up would play the 2nd round fixtures. Means a lot of sitting about for some teams though.

Clearly it wasn't as the game's in Dortmund 🤦 😆

A tall order but winning the group would be the best outcome. Would play the runner up in England's group. That one is clearly designed to get Germany a knockout game in Berlin. Runner up in our group will likely play Italy or Spain.

With our history in tournaments I appreciate your confidence! 😄 But you are spot on with the possibilities.

Some of my mates haven't been to Berlin so taking them there for a couple of days in between the Switzerland and Hungary games.

ITV news tribute was a disgrace, most of it was about the 1966 final and 1990 semi.

Any excuse to post...

Aye mentioned that to some mates earlier, bizarre coincidence. Literally two days between their deaths.

Fair point re Baresi, another elegant player who made the game look effortless.

Greatest defender of all time?

Cheers, definitely past the peak, just keeping out of everyone else's road. The couple of years I spent on the continent taught me that the fixation with pulling the decorations down by January 6th is not universally held.

That was great, I fell asleep to Hutch reading me a bedtime story 🙂

Aye one of the first acts of the Scottish parliament after devolution was to repeal Section 28.

Isolating with COVID so I won't need to bother taking the tree down. Have had beer and whisky distributed to me also 👍

Was that the American Minder? 😄 Sad news RIP David, hard to explain now just how huge Starsky and Hutch was, resulting in his spin off singing success. Remember the scenes of him being mobbed by fans at Heathrow.

If you've got your flights and you've a rough idea where you want to go it might just be worth pre-booking individual train journies. We're doing Dusseldorf to Berlin, Berlin to Stuttgart and Stuttgart to Zurich and it's cost around 60 quid in total. Plus your match tickets will get you travel across quite a wide area for 36 hours around the games.

If you're using an inter-rail pass to get to Germany and back from Scotland, it must be fairly competitive with flying, given the cost of plane tickets to Germany?