Euro 2024: Tactical freedom, upsets and great goals light up thrilling group stage

The first stage of Euro 2024 came to a close late on Wednesday with a series of uninvited guests hurtling around on the turf of the Volksparkstadion in Hamburg, side-stepping security marshalls. Pitch invasions have been a sporadic theme in Germany through an event captivating a vast share of global TV audiences. It can look unruly. If it’s not rogue spectators, wanting to congratulate compatriots or merely to touch Cristiano Ronaldo, it’s plastic cups being thrown from the grandstands.

Much of the unruliness can be explained by impetuous exuberance, better reflections of which have taken place by those entitled to be on Euro 2024’s pitches, the stars and not-yet-stars who have reminded that one of the virtues of country-versus-country tournament football is that it stimulates a spontaneity in its participants sometimes suppressed when they are on duty for their main wage-payers, their clubs.

At the most elite clubs, players tend to be under orders from domineering coaches who have sufficient time on the practice ground to plan each fixture in meticulous detail; the downside is that improvisation is strictly rationed.

Euro 2024 began with a whirl of caution-to-the-wind moments, at least if you judge by the frequency – and accuracy – of daring shots from distance, from Germany’s Florian Wirtz’s striking the first of the tournament’s 81 goals so far from just outside from the edge of the Scotland penalty area, to Turkey’s Mert Muldur and Arda Guler’s thumping contributions to a thrilling Turkey-Georgia, to Denmark’s Morten Hjulmand’s equaliser against England. The relatively high ratio of these sorts of long-range efforts attest to the theory that footballers, while on summer duty in their national jerseys, might risk