Euro 2024 kick-off: Germany and Scotland prepare to get party started – live

Your tournament wall chart is Blu-Tacked firmly in place, the preview supplement’s been scoured from cover to cover, your work diary is marked “busy” for the next month. The day of reckoning, or certainly the day of Germany v Scotland in Munich, has finally arrived.

In just a few hours’ time the curtain will be raised on a four-week festival of football the like of which we’ve rarely seen, unless you count the two other major international tournaments that have somehow been shoehorned into the past three years.

Will France and Kylian Mbappé take Euro 2024 by storm? Will Germany thrill home fans with a run deep into the knockout rounds? Will [pre-2008] perennial underachievers, Spain, flatter to deceive – or tiki-taka their way to glory? Will Italy leave their egos at the door and become much greater than the sum of their parts? Will Poland be frustrating and a bit rubbish? Will England flop early, or crash out agonisingly late? We’re about to have answers to all these questions – and so much more.

Today, on this blog, we’ll have previews, team news, other news, and emails from you. Auf gehts!