This week marks the start of the UEFA Women’s Euro 2022 in England.
The championship was originally set to take place in Summer 2021, but had to be pushed back due to the Covid delayed olympics.
The Netherlands dominated the last Euro Championship meeting back in 2017, and will be back competing again this year.
There will be 16 teams competing, and the championship is set to kick off on Wednesday at 8pm with the home team playing against Austria.
The 16 teams will be divided into four groups of four with the top two teams in each progressing to the knockout stages.
The groups are as follows:
Group A: England, Austria, Norway, Northern Ireland
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Group B: Germany, Denmark, Spain, Finland
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Group C: Netherlands, Sweden, Portugal, Switzerland
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Group D: France, Italy, Belgium, Iceland
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Even though a play-off position previously seemed within reach, the Republic of Ireland will not make an appearance at the European Championships this summer because of a gut-wrenching own goal defeat in Kiev that landed them third in their qualifying Group I just behind Ukraine.
Ukraine went on to be eliminated in the playoffs by Northern Ireland who are making their first ever major tournament appearance this week.
Northern Ireland is the only team in the Euros that is not ranked in FIFA’s top 30 coming in at 47th in the world, and their placement into the highly skilled Group A could prove to be quite an interesting challenge.
Going into the competition, popular opinion states that Spain, England, Norway and Sweden are amongst the favourites to win, but there is no reason to count out any of the other teams just yet.
Sweden clinched the silver medal at last year’s Tokyo Olympics leaving them as the highest ranked team in the competition, giving them some great momentum to build off of.
Under new management, the Netherlands may find this time around to prove more difficult, but they should still be in good standing all-time top scorer, Vivianne Miedema, on call.
Matches are scheduled through 31 July with the knockout stages beginning 20 July, and you can catch all the action live on RTÉ and BBC.
