The first late kickoff of the round was basically sold on Cristiano Ronaldo’s name. I only dragged myself up at 4 a.m. and caught one half, and honestly, he was dreadful. If this is the level now, retirement would not be an outrageous idea.

What made it worse was hearing Xu Yang still trying to package it as nostalgia and praise. At some point, leaning on sentiment becomes embarrassing.

The rain at least produced one memorable visual: the Czech players in white kits all seemed to be wearing those cropped compression tops underneath, which gave the whole thing an unexpectedly flashy look.

Then there was the halftime advertising. That coconut water ad, with its black background and yellow text, had such a retro, low-tech feel that it was somehow far more pleasant to look at than Qi Wei’s aggressively high-tech face. The funniest part is that I still can’t remember what product she was actually endorsing.

Expanding the tournament to 24 teams has clearly watered things down. There are just too many weak sides now, and the 9 p.m. matches often don’t offer much. Of the upcoming early games, the only one I bothered with was Croatia against Albania.

And if Croatia are trading punches with a team like Albania, then that defense is basically made of paper. You can talk about pedigree all you want, but the back line looked fragile throughout.

Still, every golden generation reaches its end sooner or later. For a country smaller than Harbin in area, with a national history shorter than my own age, Croatia producing two golden generations since independence is already remarkable. Just as football eventually had to say goodbye to the old Czech side, Ireland, Sweden, Denmark, and Bulgaria, it may finally be time to say goodbye to the checkered shirts as a real force.

I said it after the previous match too: Spain are playing well. This time it was Williams on the left who completely lit up the game. If not for the Italian goalkeeper, the scoreline would have been broken open much earlier. Unfortunately, the goal came at exactly the moment when my energy was at its lowest, so I nodded off and missed it.

Maybe Poland being eliminated early changed the stakes, but the Netherlands and France ended up playing what felt like a tacit non-aggression pact. In the first half they kicked lumps out of each other, then after around the 70th minute both sides seemed to silently agree to shut it down.

Depay recovered a little of his old chaos-agent nature, though only a little. I still don’t understand why they won’t give the younger Simons more of a shot.

Van Dijk had problems too. It wasn’t a total defensive disappearance, but he definitely failed to get tight enough when it mattered.

And Xavi Simons brought Seedorf in 1996 to mind for a moment. That said, the disallowed goal was offside without any doubt.

For all the talk about tournament drama, some 0-0 draws are still the worst kind of draw, no matter how much people try to dress them up.