Euro has the big fish, but it’s the heroics of small nations that gave us joy

Jude Bellingham’s overhead kick, one-bounce goal against a tiring Slovakia the other day is being likened, among other things, to Pele’s flamboyant goal for the Allied prisoners of war team in John Houston’s cult film, ‘Escape to Victory’. Social media reels are rife with comparisons, but the chief difference to note here is that Pele played for the underdog, Bellingham belongs to the elite.Bellingham’s strike, as late as the 95th minute, rescued England from an inglorious exit. But had England lost, it would have also announced the arrival of the underdog on the biggest stage of Europe’s football.That hope was kicked away but watching Georgia, Slovenia, even tiny Albania whose Nedim Bajrami scored the fastest goal of all Euros when he found the net barely 23 seconds after kick-off against defending champions Italy, have given us moments to relish and questions to ponder over at this Euros in Germany. It is possible that this time, the challenge to football’s status quo from smaller nations has a sense of permanence to it. Not just flash, but a finality.Has the unique nature of football’s free trade across continents caused this emerging new normal? Is the inter-mingling of footballers and coaches across Europe’s many leagues finally bringing an equalisation and homogeneity to footballing philosophies? It looks like it, given the belief with which less-fancied nations played in Germany this summer, as was famously seen in Slovakia’s organised defiance against Gareth Southgate’s team, or even against Slovenia before. Debutant Georgia’s defeat of Cristiano Ronaldo’s talented — and vastly more experienced — Portugal is a clear indication of how this sharing of knowledge has raised their standards.mediumhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s-LSy9tYmVEBelatedly resurgent Austria and Romania, World Cup heroes of the 1980s and 1990s, staked claim to reassert their legacy. Austria perhaps played the most attractive football in the group stages, while a fine Romania side which included Ianis, son of the great Gheorghe Hagi, were unlucky to bow out to the Dutch.In a manner typical of small teams’ willingness to adapt, Switzerland, a constant but once-staid European middle-runger, changed its ways. Among the first nations in Europe to include players of different ethnicities in their team, Switzerland coach Murat Yakin’s squad had most of its players playing professionally across the divisions of the Italian Serie A. That crucial inside knowledge of an opponent’s ways — in this case, also the employer — was perhaps key to knocking out the defending champions. Captain Granit Xhaka is a prime example of the much-travelled European footballer. His current workplace is Germany with Bayer Leverkusen, he knows the insides of the England side having played alongside English striker Bukayo Saka and others during his stint at Arsenal.Maybe this is what is being called the larger idea of the Pep Effect, now a footballing leitmotif of sorts in Europe named after game-changing manager Pep Guardiola. A style of play based on a high pressing game, possession-based football, it has its own local versions now.mediumThe performance of the less-fancied also invariably begs the bigger question whether football, despite its global following, is perhaps easier to play, organise, develop and excel at, especially for First World nations. For example, such is the sheer population of talent at their disposal that France can even field a second team, formed purely from immigrant origin footballers from its arrondissements.But if France is football’s nobility, Croatia is the gentry. With a population of just 3.8 million, ten times less than Delhi, the tiny nation’s players are much sought after by clubs across the continent, and they continue to spin fairytales at the World Cup.medium111539646In their book ‘Soccernomics: Why France and Germany win, why England are beginning to and why the rest of the world loses’, Simon Kuper and Stefan Szymanski crunch numbers — GDP, per capita income, population, area and football experience — to come up with top overachievers and underachievers among international teams. Their data reveals Croatia to be the most efficient football team, the greatest overachiever given its tiny resources, followed by neighbour Bosnia-Herzegovina.All this flies in the face of the long-running gripe back home of India not being able to excel at football, despite being a nation of over a billion people. Is there a correlation at all with large size and success at football? Using the same parameters, ‘Soccernomics’ dwells on the worst underachieving team on earth: “Indians barely ever saw the world’s best football, let alone played against it.”As India and its football continue to be in a state of perpetual stalemate, its predicament doesn’t go unnoticed. “Sleeping giant, the standard term for Indian football, feels too polite,” is the damning verdict by Kuper and Co. Chew on this, as the minnows dazzle us.