Max Rushden is joined by Barney Ronay, Jonathan Liew and Jonathan Wilson to preview the semi-finals, including England v Netherlands

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On the podcast today; England are somehow within one game of the Euro 2024 final. It’s Gareth Southgate’s third semi-final in four tournaments, but how do we assess this one and how, if at all, will his approach change from here?

Southgate might be better at the management than the football but an implausible triumph for his team is still possible

Club football, at least at the elite level, is meticulously planned. Teams of analysts pore over the data, find the patterns, identify the signings who will fit the style and mitigate areas of weakness, highlight potential flaws in opponents. The richest teams can buy not only the best players but also the best coaches and the best analysts and, as a result, elite club football, in as much as a sport as capricious as football ever can be, is predictable.

International football is wild. You can’t buy to fill the gaps. Squads end up so unbalanced and incoherent that coaches may as well be working at Manchester United. Managers can prepare but time is limited. History is always present; cultures even now remain defined. Spain will pass. France will grind. Portugal will defer to Cristiano Ronaldo. England will retreat inexplicably in defence of a lead (and, at times, a draw). Coaches have limited time with players who are being trained week-to-week in a vast range of different styles.

Striker might not be Cruyffian idea of the Total Football frontman but he found way to break down Turkey defence

Orthodoxy, in the end, prevailed. International football, perhaps, always has a slightly retro feel, with its teams of mismatched parts, the basic pressing structures, the preponderance of games decided not by tactical plans or even ability, but by human desire and passion and doing the right thing at just the right time. It is, perhaps, a more heroic form of the game, a world in which there is still a place for champions to rise above the analysis of the technocrats.

And there is little more retro than the tactic, in extremis, of throwing on a big man. For Ronald Koeman, as for Louis van Gaal before him, when there is an emergency for the Netherlands, call for Wout Weghorst. The Burnley striker might not be the Cruyffian idea of the Total Footballing front man, but this is not the first time he has turned a game for his country after coming off the bench. Weghorst didn’t score, but he gave the Netherlands a focal point to their attack around which Cody Gakpo, Memphis Depay and Xavi Simons could operate, and he gave them a way that Austria couldn’t find in the last 16 to break down this Turkish defence. He actually won only one header, touched the ball just 13 times, but presence is not easily measured by statistics.

This Germany team could not emulate side of 2006 in a tournament intertwined with complicated nationalism

For much of Germany’s Euro 2024 quarter-final against Spain, it had seemed like a modern rewrite of their 2006 World Cup quarter-final against Argentina. In both games the technically more accomplished Spanish-speakers took the lead about five minutes after half-time, before the doughty Teutons ground their way back, taking advantage of some debatable substitutions, equalising in the final 10 minutes with a left-wing cross that was headed on to the goalscorer.

A German victory on penalties seemed inevitable, the only question whether Manuel Neuer would ostentatiously consult notes scribbled on hotel notepaper and secreted in his sock before each kick as Jens Lehmann had 18 years previously.