Eurotrash: Mary Hannigan takes a sideways look at Euro 2016

The One And Only Peter Shilton

He has, for the bulk of his life, been cruelly dubbed a one-hit wonder, but in all honesty it's a struggle to think of any tune Chesney Hawkes crooned other than 'The One And Only'.

Where is he now?

Well, he’s on Twitter advertising a gig at the Half Moon in Putney which will celebrate the 25th anniversary of that chart topper being released. Which made us kind of sad – both because it’s the Half Moon in Putney, and not Wembley Stadium, and that the years are rocketing by.

There's no confirmation yet as to whether Peter Shilton will make a guest appearance at the Half Moon, but with any luck he will. Because Shilts has teamed up with Chesney to produce a quite stupendous Euro 2016 tune entitled 'The Realistic Anthem' in association with microwaveable burger company Rustlers. No, really.

The tune opens with a rousing chorus of ‘We hope we win, we hope we win, we’ll probably lose, but we hope we win’, building up to Shilts’ part which climaxes with:

“Eleven strong men representing a country that invented the postage stamp, the hydraulic crane and vulcanisation of rubber.

And we’ll still be here when we get knocked out on penalties.

. . . Flame grilled burgers you can cook in 90 seconds. England.

. . .Yes, this is a great country.

A country that invented anaesthetic.

So what does it matter if we don’t beat Slovakia.

We beat pain!”

Epic.

Sullivan junior makes rapid reverse

Least sensible tweet in response to that Dimitri Payet winner for France: "My Dad owns him!"

At which point David Sullivan Jr, son of West Ham co-owner David Snr, had to issue a sizeable apology: “Payet tweet had been deleted. I by no means meant we “own” DIMI – it is just amazed a player of his quality is under contract at West Ham. I by no means meant anything racist or that we literally own him. Just an exclamation of proudness that he is part of WHU.”

Mind you, at the rate Payet’s going, it’ll be someone else entirely who owns him come the start of next season.

1966 and all that

Jerome Boateng’s rather spectacular goalline clearance for Germany against Ukraine on Sunday night led to many a fine tribute from his compatriots, but none better than the one from German journalist Werner Martin Doyé who could conclude that 1966 would have been entirely different if Boateng had been there.

By the numbers – 89,000

That’s how many tweets per minute there were about Dimitri Payet’s opening game winner, making him and his goal the most tweeted about moment of Euro 2016 so far. You really hope, though, that they had a machine to help them do the counting.

Iceland and that empty feeling

Which nation has the emptiest feeling about it at the moment? No, not Scotland, it’s Iceland – according to our well thumbed Iceland Monitor, that’s the percentage of the population of the country that is in France for Euro 2016, 26,985 people in all. Huge.

The facts behind Harry Kane’s corners

Perhaps the biggest single gripe that England fans had during their game against Russia was Harry Kane being their corner-taking man, which pretty much ruled out the possibility of him getting on the end of said corners and heading them home.

There was, then, much talk of the Spurs man's aerial threat being completely and utterly wasted by Roy Hodgson, which made people very, very mad.

Enter Football 365 and a fact or two: Kane lost 142 of the aerial battles he competed in in Premier League games last season, putting him behind nine other English players in the list. And of his 28 goals for Spurs in all competitions, only two were headers – and just one from a corner, against Qarabag FK in the Europa League. Their conclusion was, therefore, that he shouldn’t take corners because he’s rubbish at them, and not because he’s prolific with his head.

We sense a headed hat-trick coming on.

Euro Twitter

Eurotrash Talk

“I don’t see anything wrong with the fans fighting. Quite the opposite, well done lads, keep it up!”

– Igor Lebedev, an MP, deputy chairman of the Russian parliament and a member of the Russian football union’s executive committee. Good gawd.

Sleepy Welsh fan wakes to bit of a nightmare

Gareth Tansey is, indisputably, now the most famous Welsh fan at Euro 2016, but not for a reason he's particularly pleased about. Yes, he was the poor unfortunate who slept through the anthems and entire first half of Wales' game against Slovakia, managing to miss Gareth Bale's 10th-minute goal. Welsh rugby legend Shane Williams even tried to wake him up, but no success. And you know what happened next: his compatriots queued up to take photos of him, almost all of which ended up on Twitter.

What caused Gareth’s sleepiness? Take a wild guess. “I’d had quite a few drinks before the game and we were still topping up from the night before, to be honest,” he told Wales Online. “We must have had about 10 or 12 pints before polishing off a bottle of wine, so it probably wasn’t the best idea.”

“My mum and my missus have seen the picture and they weren’t happy. They said, ‘you’ve gone all the way out there and couldn’t even look after yourself!’”

“But it could have been worse, it’s not as if I’ve been rioting like they have in Marseille.”

Well, true.

Fans must wait to serenade Will Grigg

‘Will Grigg’s on fire’ is, of course, one of the finer footballing tunes of the century, the striker frequently serenaded with it by both his Wigan and Northern Ireland admirers. Alas, the poor fella didn’t even get on for NI against Poland, resulting in this heat map of his contribution to the game doing the rounds. Bless.