There are some descriptors which just can't help but feel like damning with faint praise. "Actually not bad", "better than I expected". Add to this "best Italian restaurant in Augsburg".

That's nothing against Michelangelo, which I'm sure is great, it's just that Donauwörther Strasse in Augsburg doesn't exactly scream la dolce vita.

The subject arises as Team Herald are looking to find somewhere to spend our last night in the city before we follow the Tartan Army north to Cologne, but it won't be Michelangelo anyway because the rest of the squad have already been there.

Jonny's meticulous research - he insists there's no truth to the allegations he just scrolls through Tripadvisor in descending order - turns up a fish restaurant but that's closed.

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Plan B is a restaurant just off Rathausplatz which is rammed. We inform the Maître d' that we do not have a reservation and ask if we can make one for an hour.

"There is no sense to this," comes his teutonic reply. "You can go away for half hour, come back, maybe I have table outside."

We weigh it up and inform him we'll have a look around and potentially return in a little bit.

"OK great, I hope to see you again," he says, in a tone which makes very clear we better never darken his door again.

As a result dinner is in a proper Bavarian brauhaus and excellent value for money - two pints of unfiltered lager from the cellar, a schnitzel with a mountain of chips and a strudel which would make Hans Landa blush comes back at just shy of £26.

We retire to a nearby terrace for Italy's opening match of the tournament against Albania, which features the Albanians taking a shock lead inside the first minute with the fastest goal in European Championship history.

It occurs so rapidly that one idiot completely misses it, having decided to go to the toilet just before kick-off (it's me. I'm idiot.).

Germany is home to both a large Italian and Albanian diaspora so there's plenty of support for both in the city.

Indeed, we're informed of both Italy's equaliser and their second goal by the whoops and cheers from an Italian restaurant across the square whose picture is clearly around 10 seconds ahead of ours. Two old Albanian men smoke in contemplative silence.

In the end Albania lose to the Azzurri but they put up a far better showing than Scotland did on Friday night and go close to an equaliser at the end only to be denied by the barest of touches from Italy goalkeeper Gianluigi Donnarumma.

When the final whistle sounds an elderly Italian gentleman pumps both fists toward the Albanians around him and declares "campioni del mondo!" ("champions of the world"). This is both factually inaccurate and probably unwise - on the list of people I'd least like to fight, tanked up Albanians score pretty highly.

Thankfully there's no aggro and both sets of fans seem to make the most of the myriad bars in what is a trendy student town.

Not so for Team Herald who have to get a train to Cologne in the morning, though we are stung by being charged €3.50 each for Josh's two glasses of what we had assumed were the requested tap water.

An early start brings the obligatory continental breakfast immortalised by that Key & Peele sketch (a fork and a spoon? A fpoon! Oh Germany, what will you think of next?").

It is exactly as all these things are, which is to say perfectly adequate. I have a cup of tea which is not very good but almost certainly better than the orange juice, which I suspect those sneaky continentals have snuck bits into.

Just as a public service announcement: pulp is not juice, it has no business being in juice, and if I ever get my way not straining it out will be a capital offence.

Our intrepid team make it to the train which, unusually for this trip, is on bang on time. Next stop Cologne and some Kölsch. For purely journalistic purposes you understand...