Generally speaking, any assessment of the merits of the penalty shoot-out as a means of settling football matches will fall into two distinct categories – if your team has won the day, their superiority has rightly been confirmed. Lose, and it’s a lottery, akin to randomly selecting numbers from a hat.
With 90 Minutes Online being a public platform, our humble website does occasionally receive approaches from companies wanting to utilise us for commercial reasons. Yet in all honesty a lot of these tend to be concerning products that have little relevance to football, thus inducing a Bill Hicks style rant from yours truly.
If truth be told, few of even the most optimistic of the Republic of Ireland's avid followers would have harboured particularly high hopes for the country’s prospects of success at this summer’s European championships.
At last, the European Championships are upon us. All teams have now played at least once, and we have seen a host of current Premier League stars. But for every one of these Prem players strutting their stuff in Poland and Ukraine, there’s plenty who didn’t quite make it in England’s top flight. If nothing else, the Euro’s are proof that there is indeed life after the Premier League.
The Euro 2012 planning would have been meticulous, with the big hitters determined to emerge top dog - time to put the opposition in their place. Their tactics agreed and communicated, their line-ups confirmed. And then, with the eyes of the world upon them, the main protagonists could get to work. Yes, the BBC and ITV are primed and eager to do battle. The serious business of viewing figures is at stake here, after all.