Live blog: France dominating early on against Portugal
Will the main round stay close? After three games in both groups, the biggest winning margin was just four goals, and Spain are the only side without any points.
Saturday's focus is back on Herning, where Germany want to stay top of the group.
I think that defence will be important. The Costa brothers put an enormous amount of pressure on, they play a bit like Denmark, who put lots of pressure on us throughout the match in one-on-one situations, and it’s for us to respond to the impacts. I think it’ll be a great match.
It’s a big team. They are European champions, they don’t need a presentation on each player they have. They are good on defence, they are good in attack, they have good goalkeepers. I think we need to try to put some aggression on our defence, they have really good transitions. We need to try to stop their transitions, necause they score a lot of goals on transitions, they are fast, and try to be efficient on our attack. We just need to be a little bit better on our defence.
14:55
A round-up of some fun facts and stats before the matches today:
- Francisco Costa remains the competition's top scorer, with 39 goals after four matches; Mathias Gidsel is second, with 34. In 2024, the older Costa, Martim, tied with Gidsel for overall top scorer of the EURO
- the last time France and Portugal played against each other was at the 2025 World Championship, when France beat Portugal in the bronze medal match (35:34 after overtime)
- Denmark have the overwhelming head-to-head advantage over Spain (19 wins to eight) thanks to a seven-year stretch between 2015 and 2022 when Spain did not beat Denmark once
- Germany and Norway met in the 2016 semi-final, when Germany won before going on to claim their second title
- six players in the Norwegian squad play for German clubs
14:30
The build-up to a match involves a fair bit of warming up. France's team went to the gym for some mobilisation (after an earlier stroll around Herning) and we're now in that pre-match stage where various players from both teams are walking on to court and messing around with balls in an unstructured sort of way. Things get more serious soon: France and Portual throw off in an hour!
14:15
25-year-old left back Miro Schluroff has had an outstanding tournament for Germany so far, scoring 17 goals, but he has also converted 56 per cent more shots than would have been expected.
13:45
In today's "fun things teams are doing before the match" news, Germany's Nils Lichtlein and Jannik Kohlbacher test their handball knowledge. You don't need to understand German to enjoy this!
13:15
All three matches tonight are repeats of previous high-stakes meetings - semi-finals and medal matches at major tournaments. So all the players know each other well, and know each other's style of play well.
But perhaps nobody knows each other as well as Germany's Rune Dahmke and Norway's Sander Sagosen, who are married to the Oftedal sisters, Stine and Hanna. The brothers-in-law will have to put aside any family loyalties today.
Dahmke told us yesterday: "If I only knew him as an opponent on the court, I don’t know whether he would be my first choice in the group of friends — but I didn’t really have much of a choice because of our wives. To be serious: he’s a really great guy. We played together in Kiel for a few years, which was a lot of fun, and we still miss him in the dressing room.”
