Euro 2008

Part of the fun of living in Leipzig so far has been that the Euro 2008 tournament has been on while we've been here. The games were held jointly in Austria and Switzerland and while we didn't manage to get to any of the games in person we did watch a lot of them for the first few weeks that we were here. In fact the cycle of most days was: get up, go to work, come home, eat dinner, go to the biergarten and watch the game or games, drink beer, go to sleep. With two games per night for two weeks straight in the group stage there was no lack of football available. Most of the Germany games we saw with our German friends either at the bar or at someone's flat and these were the most enjoyable games for us.

To make things more interesting we instituted a small tipping competition between the five of us (Stefan J was staying with Ruth and Rhett for most of the first two weeks) where we had to pick the result and the score of every game. We also had a sweepstake for the ultimate winner of the tournament. I started out strongly with a few well picked games and then faded with a bad patch in the middle where I couldn't pick a result to save my life. It was actually a lot of fun and quite a close thing because we got to the final between Spain and Germany and there were three of us still in contention to win. I ended up picking Spain (although not the boring 1-0) result while everyone else went for the home favourite and this got me over the line to win the pot. Ruth had drawn Spain in the sweepstake so she got her entry fee back. If Germany had won, Stefan would have won both the tipping and the sweepstake!

It was a bit sad to see Germany lose at the last hurdle but on the night Spain played the better game and were deserved winners. Hopefully our favourite players: Ballack, Lahm, Schweinsteiger and Lehman will still be playing in 2010 in South Africa and we'll see them go all the way (unless Australia wins it of course!)