Martin Tyler has put off his summer holidays to head to Austria and Switzerland for Euro 2008 - and he'll be sharing his experiences right here on skysports.com.

And don't forget to check back later in the week to get more of Martin's inside take on what's going on at Euro 2008.

The opening days

My first diary entry comes from Innsbruck, where I'm patiently waiting for Guus Hiddink's press conference to start.

Russia of course play Spain on Tuesday and that will be my second game of the tournament, but after the opening matches, I think that Germany and Portugal have both put down markers.

Those sides impressed me because they both played the full 90 minutes trying to score goals. In the past Germany have put their foot on the ball and just passed it around in their own half in the last 10 minutes, but this time they looked like they wanted to score with every attack right up until the final whistle.

I'm working for SBS Australia who have kindly kept me involved in these World Cups and European Championships for almost 20 years now. In fact this is my 11th major tournament and I'm very grateful to Sky for letting me go off and do it.

Andy Gray is working for ESPN in the United States and Richard Keys is working for Al Jazeera in Dubai, so we're keeping up our knowledge for the new season.

Of course, England are not here and therefore there are far fewer British journalists out here and it does feel much more like a foreign tournament - but that's not to say it's as subdued as it has been reported.

A brush with Basel

My first port of call was Basel, where the opening game took place on Saturday afternoon. It was my first time in the city and the local team had a really good season under Christian Gross so there was a genuine football feel about the place.

The first hotel I stayed in was right by the fans zone so my first two nights were pretty interrupted! But now I've moved to a sort of holiday lodge type place in the mountains overlooking Innsbruck which is beautiful.

The Basel-St. Jakob-Park stadium was the venue for the opening match between Switzerland and the Czech Republic and it is a really compact ground, which is great for commentators because there's no running track and it's fairly intimate.

Before the match started I was in the commentary position and caught up with the former Liverpool midfielder, Vladimir Smicer, who was working for Czech television.

He's currently playing for Slavia Prague, but he was there as part of the media and he very modestly told me that he was just helping out and trying to become the Andy Gray of the Czech Republic!

He was very chatty and he told me that he was grateful for his time at Liverpool which he really enjoyed - and he obviously had a very big smile on his face at the end of the game.

The game itself was a good one, but I thought Switzerland were a bit unlucky to lose. They probably had the better efforts at goal and Petr Cech had to make the more difficult saves, but they got caught pushing out from a corner and in the end it was just one ball over the top that undid them.

It's an important three points for the Czech Republic, but I remember that they won their first group game at the last World Cup and then ended up losing the next two and not qualifying, so nothing is set in stone.

The right track

The Sunday service in Austria and Switzerland is distinctly better than the British rail network.

On Sunday I had to travel from Basel to Innsbruck in Austria by train. I had to change three times and the connections were all within three minutes, so when I got on the first train I thought there was no way I was going to make any of them - but I made every single one, it was unbelievable!

We got into Innsbruck on the dot, but to be honest we wouldn't have minded being delayed because the scenery was so spectacular.

You could have stood and looked at the mountains and lakes for a very long time and even though it was a very complicated journey it was definitely a good one.

I even met a New York-based jazz quartet who were travelling from Lichtenstein to a couple of gigs in Austria. The drummer of the band was called Jeff Siegel and he was firing lots of questions at me about the tournament because they were very concerned that nobody would come out to see them!

You never know who you are going to bump into and I seem to bump into a lot of football people, but it was very different seeing Jeff and the rest of the band on their laptops listening to music and working away on new songs.

The difference this time is that you are much more a citizen of the world in this particular tournament and not part of the British media pack - and that has been a fundamental difference so far.