Spain v Georgia LIVE: Team news and starting line-ups for Euro 2024 last-16 tie in Cologne

The fans are arriving now, still two hours ahead of kick-off, and just beginning to generate at atmopshere of excitement.

These Georgia fans inside the concourse are hopeful of another big performance from their team…

…while Spain have a number gathering in one of the lower tiers, with still huge numbers outside the stadium taking photos, posing with a replica trophy (of sorts!) and singing in groups.

Meanwhile in Gelsenkirchen, England trail Slovakia 1-0 and are in all sorts of bother.

Gareth Southgate has been urged to make three changes at the break by Gary Neville on ITV Sport.

We’ll have team news for Spain and Georgia with you in the next hour.

With yesterday’s dreadful weather in Dortmund in mind – that’s only a couple of hours from here in Cologne – the sky has just turned rather moody in the last hour or so.

It’s due to rain sometime during the match but perhaps we won’t quite have as spectacular a lightshow to deal with…

The approach to the stadium for supporters gathering either city centre or at the fan park earlier today means one of two things: getting an early tram and crowding in with hundreds of others, or making a reasonable trek on foot, again leaving plenty of time to get there.

Either way it’s not the most well-served of grounds in the tournament, though certainly presents a picturesque approach with woods and field around it.

Our football reporter Karl Matchett is in Cologne ahead of the late game between Spain v Georgia, here’s the latest:

Spanish fans are expectant though and on the journey here, plenty of them were already talking openly about their chances against Germany – who they will meet in the quarter-finals if they win tonight.

Our football reporter Karl Matchett is in Cologne ahead of the late game between Spain v Georgia, here’s the latest:

It’s still very early with kickoff 4 hours away but already the fans are flocking towards Cologne stadium – No doubt having heard it can be difficult to do so nearer the time from previous matches.

Spain supporters are certainly more numerous than Georgia fans at this early stage, but those from the debutant nation who are here looking good spirits and for the most part are bearing the name of their hero on the back of their jerseys, Khvicha Kvaratskhelia.

After the ill-fated start to Italy football’s campaign, it was a bizarre end. Were the Azzurri, Luciano Spalletti was asked, a Fiat Panda and Switzerland football a Ferrari? “You have to accept everything, even rather tasteless allusions like yours,” said the Italy manager. “You are clearly a wonderful exponent of sarcasm.” With that, he asked his interrogator’s name, smiled and took his leave.

From Euro 2024 but not, seemingly, from the Azzurri job. Italy’s worst European Championships for 20 years will not prompt Spalletti to resign. Rather, his inquest arrowed in on what he believes the failings are in Italian football, the types of players they do not possess and which they need. He did it while claiming he was not picking on the footballers he believes have produced two sub-par performances in a competition that only brought them one win. “There is no blame to anyone, I want to stress this,” he said. “The responsibility for what happens is mine.”

It was a noble attempt to spare others criticism. Yet there may be a truth: perhaps Spalletti and Italy are a mismatch of an impossible ideal and a relatively prosaic group. Euro 2024 showed a side that was less than the sum of its parts, where they only scored three goals, where the most recent and spectacular of them, from Mattia Zaccagni in the 98th-minute against Croatia, spared them a group-stage exit only to become the first team eliminated in the last 16.

For Gareth Southgate, there is always the possibility it will come back to penalties. It is his history; England’s, too. It is also the nature of international football. The last World Cup final was decided on spot kicks, along with two quarter-finals and two last-16 ties. In Euro 2020, they determined a last-16 game, a quarter-final, a semi-final and, as England know to their cost, the final.

And yet this season’s Champions League contained its first shootout since the 2016 final. Maybe it is a consequence of one-off ties in neutral venues, maybe the way the margins can be narrower in the international game when managers lack the same time to develop a style of play and a level of cohesion to win games in regulation time. Or perhaps it is just something innate to the England manager and his team.

It is 28 years now since Andreas Kopke dived to his right to parry Southgate’s rather tame spot kick in Euro ’96. Southgate himself is responsible for bringing more thought, more practice, more science to the discipline a variety of players and managers used to describe simply as “a lottery”. Perhaps it wasn’t when England got their cathartic win against Colombia in the 2018 World Cup. Planning and practice did not make perfect against Italy in the Euro 2020 final, however. Even the tournament when his England did not have a shootout featured a crucial penalty, ballooned by Harry Kane over Hugo Lloris’ bar as France won a 2022 World Cup quarter-final.