I've been told that Northern Ireland and Slovenia were playing a qualifying match for the Euro 2012 football tournament today. I'm assuming that, for a team to qualify for said football tournament, the qualification procedure would involve playing some football. I guess they could pick the teams for the tournament by playing darts, or having a pie eating contest, but it seems likely that playing football would be preferable. So, I fired up my computer and found a (totally legal!) feed of the contest in question. Much to my surprise, I didn't see a whole lot of football being played.

Okay, all jokes aside, the match between Northern Ireland and Slovenia wasn't very good. This shouldn't be all that surprising, seeing as both teams play very defensive and rigid styles. The thing is, in the cases of both teams, their opponents usually get really frustrated, start cheating on defense, and then are susceptible on the counter-attack. When they play each other, no such thing happens. So, we just got to watch two teams defend and kick long balls for a while. Slovenia tried to play some creative attacking football at times, once they realized that Northern Ireland were never coming out of their shell, in addition to being an inferior side. They just weren't that good at it.

Serbia, a Group C rival of both of these teams, was the victim of an 85th minute equalizer by their opponents today, Estonia. So, the group standings haven't changed at all, and all three teams, along with Estonia, still have a chance to make the Euros.