大象传媒

Vienna

So, just three games to go, of which we have two live - tonight's semi between Germany and Turkey followed by Sunday's final - while ITV have one - tomorrow's semi between Spain and Russia.

This is my 10th major football tournament working in some capacity for the 大象传媒 and I think the standard of football is possibly the highest it's been in any of them.

The first tournament I worked on was , as a junior assistant producer in London. While the English, in particular, remember the tournament fondly for Gazza and the two epic knockout games with Cameroon and Germany, it wasn't actually that great a football spectacle.

A far from vintage Argentina side somehow reached the final while most of the knockout games in particular were cagey and sterile. And, to be honest, for all that's written and said about modern footballers, there was far more cynicism and gamesmanhip on show in 1990 than there has been so far at this tournament.

Here in 2008, pretty much all the sides who've done well have done so by attacking. The Arshavin-inspired Russian displays against Sweden and the Dutch were the antithesis of how tournament football often used to be played.

Having entertained in their group, perhaps understandably, Italy opted to try to neutralise the Spanish threat and hit on the break, and an injury- and supension-ravaged Turkish side will almost certainly be forced to take a cautious approach tonight against Germany, but positive football has generally won the day.

The other thing which has changed beyond recognition since 1990 is the way football is covered. Then, as now, we're in the hands of a host broadcaster.

There are occasional moments when they wrongfoot our commentators by cutting away from the action, or running in an unexpected replay, but the number of fantastic close-ups and spectacular angles used for replays is a godsend to the guys and girls making montages in our videotape area.

In particular, the "spidercam", which has been operated remotely on wires above the pitch at this tournament, has provided some extraordinary images. We've generally not been keen on it being used in match coverage, but for replays and montages it can be stunning. The "spidercam" coverage of was so good we actually ran it in full at the end of our highlights show that night.

Back in 1990, the host coverage, while seen as progressive for the times, was often covered in permanent captions, and technology had not evolved sufficiently to allow close-ups and replays of anything like the current quality.

I remember being asked to make a music item reviewing Paul Gascoigne's tournament which ran at half-time in the play-off for third place. At the time, we were pleased with it and it was reasonably well received, but when someone dug it out of the archives recently, it looked almost ludicrously old-fashioned.

Such isolated action and close-ups as there were largely came from the dedicated single camera the 大象传媒 was allowed to put amongst the stills photographers behind the goal at England games. The famous moment was booked against Germany in the semi was too far away for our dedicated camera to pick up properly, so then, and for ever more, we had to use the host images, which had captions over them.

These days, as I've mentioned before, every angle imaginable comes into the International Broadcast Centre in beautiful High Definition. A much higher level of ambition and creativity is consequently required - and achieved - by the current generation of producers and videotape editors.

To be honest, the montages of today knock spots off anything we were producing back in Italia 90, and veterans like me can only look on in admiration and be thankful that we've moved on to overseeing, rather than crafting, those items.

As in football itself, if anyone of a certain vintage in TV sport claims that things were much better in their day, they're probably deluding themselves!