Euro 2025: Quarter-Final Analysis and Opinion
In what can only be described as four days of chaos, we're left with Italy, England, Spain and France to battle it out for the tag of Euro 2025 winners...
I think it’s best for everyone we all have a few days break after that set of matches. Has there ever been a crazier set of four matches?! From penalty misses, to amazing saves, to penalty misses, to red cards, to penalty misses, to amazing goals, and to some more penalty misses, the four quarter-finals over the past four days had quite literally everything, as I look at nine key talking points across the past four days…
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Italy's moment in the sun
This is as good as it's been for Italian football in the women's game since the mid-1990s, when the national team reached the final of both Euro 1993 and Euro 1997, albeit either side of not qualifying for Euro 1995.
In reality, it's even better, because greater competition now means Italy's current run to the Euro 2025 semi-final usurps anything they've managed before, coming through a group which included the world champions and beating a star-studded Norway side in the quarter-finals.
More about Norway's underachievement below, but this is about Italy, who now stand one match away from a major final for the first time in almost 30 years. Ok, European champions England stand in their way, but whatever happens this tournament can only be quantified as a success story for Italian football.
The domestic league is improving year on year and in the space of past seven seasons most of the nation's major club names have invested heavily in the women's game, and perhaps the national team is now profiting from that domestic-first approach, with all their players currently playing their football in Italy.
Those partnerships came to fruition against Norway, and it was apt their talismanic captain Cristiana Girelli had the two biggest says, but she was flanked by two players she knows only too well from Juventus, and there looked to be more of a link there than in Norway's attack, who continued to look like strangers in the dark.
A huge match up awaits, but this is a breakthrough moment for Italy.
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