Serbia vs England LIVE: Euro 2024 team news, line-ups and buildup as Three Lions prepare for opener in Germany

In the final few sessions before Euro 2024, Gareth Southgate has been keen to ensure England’s raft of new attackers are properly up to speed with some of the team’s rehearsed moves. He can see the full picture, but the lines are still a little blurred. This team doesn’t yet have the connections visible in Euro 2020 qualifying, say, but it’s promising. How couldn’t it be promising with Jude Bellingham and Harry Kane? Southgate is unusually excited.

Such “automatisms” – where attackers instinctively execute moves from repeated rehearsal – are one of those parts of preparation that say a lot about the whole. England have been coming close to the line in a similar way.

Euro 2024 had long been looked upon as one of the tournaments when the entire St George’s Park project should finally deliver a trophy.

This may well be Southgate’s last campaign, further fostering a sense of culmination. Even the last tournament before this seemed to outline the final step that is required, as England lost to France in the 2022 World Cup quarter-final by the narrowest margins. Since Kylian Mbappe’s side have been heralded as the best in Europe, the presumption is that you win against them and you win the tournament.

Except now, so close to the line, it’s all a little blurred.

Miguel Delaney ahead of England’s opener:

With kick-off for the UEFA Euro 2024 tournament in sight, international teams have checked in across Germany to set up camp before they hit the pitch.

But where will the England team be based to keep their eye on the ball before their first match against Serbia come Sunday 16 June?

Here’s a look inside the luxury resort where players will kick up their calves for the duration of the UEFA Euros.

Denmark’s male footballers have decided to refuse a pay rise for playing for the national team in order to ensure their female counterparts get equal basic pay, the global players’ union Fifpro said on Friday.

The national football association (DBU) had been looking to ensure equal pay for both teams but players from both squads were not in favour of taking money from the men’s team to pay the women.

The players’ union, Spillerforeningen, and the men’s players instead came up with a plan under which the men would refuse a pay rise and both teams would receive the same basic remuneration for appearing for the national side.

German police have confirmed that one person has been shot and taken for medical treatment, after they threatened officers with an axe and an “incendiary device” in Hamburg, just two hours before the start of a Euro 2024 fixture in the city.

“At StPauli there is currently a major police operation,” read a statement on social media from Hamburg police. “According to initial findings, a person threatened police officers with a pickaxe and an incendiary device. The police then used their firearms. The attacker was injured and is currently receiving medical treatment.”

He has only scored four goals in 34 caps for his country and is yet to replicate that form consistently in an England shirt but Stones feels Foden could prove the outstanding individual in Germany in the next month.

Any such move could bring new scrutiny on Uefa, at a time when the EU and European Commission are monitoring the governance of European football.

The Slovenian official has been in the role since 2016, after replacing French great Michel Platini, who was forced to resign after the 2015 Fifa scandal that engulfed football. While that meant one of his three allowed terms wasn’t a full term, eyebrows were then raised at Uefa’s Congress in Paris in February, when motions were voted through that amended rules so Ceferin could potentially seek another full term in 2027. The commotion that caused eventually saw the 56-year-old announce in a rare press conference that he had decided he is “not planning to run in 2027 anymore”.

Curiously, Ceferin then refused to elaborate on that, and there was further uncertainty to that position in an interview with ZDFheute on the eve of Euro 2024. The Slovenian was directly asked whether this would be his last European Championships as Uefa president.

There are reports that riot police have moved in and detained or otherwise stopped a person with an axe at the Reeperbahn in Hamburg, where today’s opening match between Netherlands and Poland is taking place.

The 20-year-old’s inexorable rise shows no signs of abating, with fine spells at boyhood team Birmingham and Borussia Dortmund followed by a dream start to life at Real Madrid.

Bellingham won LaLiga and the competition’s best player award in his first season with the Spanish giants, who he also helped win a 15th Champions League trophy at Wembley a fortnight ago.

It has been a cruel few weeks for the senior players who have been the stalwarts of Gareth Southgate’s reign. They have been dropped and demoted, their feelings hurt sometimes while bodies have given way. John Stones had been a survivor of the Southgate cull, but there was a moment when it seemed he, too, would miss Euro 2024.

It came minutes into England’s final friendly against Iceland. A stricken Stones went down under a challenge from Jon Dagur Thorsteinsson. “I knew it wasn’t my knee or my ankle, because of the mechanism in how I landed, it was almost like my big toe in the line straight down my foot and you think ‘I have fractured it’,” he recalled.

The curse of the metatarsal has hit England in the past, broken feet, or bones in feet, a factor in summer disappointments. It looked as though 2024 could be a throwback to 2002 or 2006. If Stones’ importance has risen amid the injury problems of Luke Shaw and Harry Maguire, it looked as though Southgate could lose his only centre-back with World Cup or European Championship experience.

Les Bleus have won just about everything in football – several times over – but the European Championship has eluded France for more than two decades, with manager Didier Deschamps taking his second crack at becoming the first man to win the World Cup and Euros as both player and coach.

Austria would typically be no trouble for France but German manager Ralf Rangnick has led a transformation this past two years, with his side imbued with confidence having lost only once in their last 16 matches.