The road to the 2012 UEFA European championship gets going today, with a full slate of matches: England v Bulgaria is perhaps the one to watch (and is the most accessible to watch in the US: it’s on FSC & FSE at 3pm ET), with a number of additional matches to be streamed on ESPN3.

Most of the latter look to be mismatches (Andorra v Russia, Estonia v Italy, San Marino v Netherlands, Portugal v Cyprus…Liechtenstein v Spain!).  But a few matches that look like they could be more interesting: Sweden v Hungary, Belgium v Germany, and France v Belarus (given the extraordinary French showing in South Africa).

The aim for all these European sides is to end up in Poland and Ukraine in June 2012 (via UEFA,com: “The final tournament of the 14th UEFA European Football Championship will be held in Poland and Ukraine from 8 June to 1 July 2012. It will be the third time that the final tournament is jointly hosted by two countries (after Belgium/Netherlands in 2000 and Austria/Switzerland in 2008).”)  But the road to Gdansk, Poznan, Warsaw, Wroclaw, Donetsk, Lviv, Kharkiv and Kyiv is a long and nearly indecipherable one…