There’s still plenty of time before the next Group B matches to decide for yourself what to make of those question marks from Saturday, those less-than-inspiring-outings from two Euro favs, Germany and the Netherlands – one even less inspiring than the other, obviously. Ahem.
Meanwhile, here’s what two principals had to say about their team’s deflated openers, Germany’s squeaker win and Holland’s “What just happened?” loss.
Dutch midfielder Wesley Sneijder (pictured), one of the few Dutchmen who appeared up for the job, on his country’s 1-0 loss to Denmark:
Dominating a match isn’t enough. Look what’s happened – we left empty-handed. We missed that last bit of sharpness. If you truly dominate a match, you don’t let your opponent get into it and you put your chances away. We started well, in the opening 20 minutes we should have scored a couple and then everything would have been fine. We could maybe even have then racked up more. But instead the first goal fell at the other end, and we spent the rest of the game trying to repair the damage.”
And German boss Joachim Low, on his side’s 1-0 victory over Portugal, where the losers waited too late to get their attack going but did see some chances come and go at the end:
This opening win can gives the team an initial spark for the tournament, it gives us more confidence. But we need to improve on certain things, though. We need to create more scoring chances, because the tournament has now begun. It is not like the World Cup where you can have a sort of warm-up game [against a weak team]. Here you start at 100 percent like in Formula One, only without a warm-up lap. You can’t start the tournament chasing after the music.”