Match 10 - Switzerland v Turkey / Dan Fitch / 10 June 2008 / Leave a comment

They say that a great tournament needs a great host and I have my doubts if either Austria or Switzerland meet this criteria.

There certainly wasn't the atmosphere you'd expect in the tournament's opening match between Switzerland and the Czech Republic.

At times the stadium featured the sort of twitchy silence that normally ensues when a vicar asks a wedding congregation if they know of any lawful impediment whereby a couple shouldn't marry.

The TV footage showing the Swiss fans cheerfully smiling, just didn't look right. There wasn't the sort of nervous anticipation or cocksure bravado that one normally sees in a football stadium. The Swiss may be careful investors in financial terms, but their hearts don't seem to be invested in football.

But what should we expect from such a notoriously neutral nation? Neutrality in football just doesn't work, which is why referees and commentators are such curious beasts. How can you not want someone to win? Football as a mere spectacle can only take you so far. For it to truly work as a collective experience, you have to really care.

Part of the problem is the stadiums. I'll excuse the Stade de Suisse Wankdorf, due to its titter inducing name, but the rest are just too small. Only one arena being used in the tournament holds more than 32,000 and all the fans that should be able to buy a ticket if it were held in a larger country, are instead herded into fan parks.

Switzerland's second match should have a livelier atmosphere, as they face Turkey, whose fans could be described as plenty of things, but never quiet. Turkey were unexpectedly lively in their opening game against Portugal and will certainly rouse their fans should they show similar ambition against the Swiss.

The one thing that ruined the entertaining contest between Portugal and Turkey, was Clive Tyldesley's tiresome insistence of repeatedly giving us the biography of Colin Kazim Richards. Just because he used to play for Sheffield United and is vaguely familiar to an English audience, doesn't mean that I want to know so much about him that I could enter Mastermind with the decidedly average attacker as my chosen specialist subject.

You'd think that after both suffering losses in the first game, that the two sides would be desperate for a win. History doesn't favour a goalfest though. Since Euro 96 there have been two occasions when sides that both lost their first game, played each other in the second match. Neither match broke 2.5 goals.

Recent encounters between the two sides show some promise. Turkey and Switzerland were drawn together in the qualifiers for Euro 1996 and World Cup 2006. Of their four encounters three broke 2.5 goals, averaging at 3.5 goals per game.

Switzerland suffered a massive blow when they lost skipper and talisman Alaxander Frei to injury. Frei has a great record of 35 goals from 59 games. This represents over a third of all the goals scored by the Switzerland squad and they have no prolific scorer as a replacement.

Their manager Kobi Kuhn proclaimed Frei's injury as a disaster, which is a more honest statement than you'd expect from a coach. Given that his wife is still in an artificial coma following her fit last week, he could be forgiven for not caring one way or the other and this all adds to the feeling of an impeding disaster for the Swiss.

Turkey lost their opening matches of both of the previous European Championships that they have qualified for and on neither occasion did they break 2.5 goals in their second match. Even in their most successful tournament, the World Cup of 2006, they could only manage a 1-1 draw with Costa Rica following their opening loss to Brazil.

So slow starters then, which would be an apt enough description of the tournament so far. Unders is again the hot favourite at [1.54], with overs at [2.74]. You can't fault this logic, but how attacking the two sides are may depend on the result of Portugal v Czech Republic.

Tags: Switzerland, Turkey