[danielf]

Well, it's official now. The Brits (well, the sensible part of them that reads the Guardian) support Holland.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/football/2...08.netherlands

t has taken a labyrinthine process of celebrity endorsements, two rounds of voting and the unravelling of an intricate internet election scam.

But Guardian readers have finally produced a definitive answer to the big question about Euro 2008, at least if you're British - who to support in the first major football tournament without either a British or an Irish presence since 1984. And the answer is: the Netherlands. The final verdict was arrived at via an online poll from a shortlist of Romania, Spain, Sweden, the Netherlands and Germany.

There were 48,232 votes cast in the poll, the overwhelming majority of them - 96.2% - for the Netherlands. Spain came second with 1.8% of the vote, followed by Germany (1.4%); Sweden (0.4%) and Romania (0.2%). If the level of support for the Netherlands seems surprisingly high, it is because Dutch ingenuity even extended to hacking into and trying to rig the Guardian's online poll.

In the final days of voting, the Dutch website GeenStijl (literally "no style") instigated a campaign to tilt the balance their country's way, eventually spawning a triumphant piece of hacking that gave Holland an improbable percentage of the votes.

Since they would have won without cheating, the Guardian decided not to disqualify the team.