Euro 2008 - an apology

I would like to unreservedly apologise to anyone who read my previous blog on the future of German football. Any similarity between the German team I described and the one that showed up in Vienna last night was purely coincidental.

I would further like to say to any Germans who may stumble across this page, that you should write to your MP, get out on the streets and start petitions for the banishment of Per Mertesacker, Christoph Metzelder and Philip Lahm to a country far less pleasant than Germany, but which for their own torture, will behave like a creepy imitation of the Heimat: remaining in Austria is the only way to properly torture them for their cretinous antics against a Spanish team which was far superior.

Then again, the Leicester Celtic under-12's C team would have played both sides of the park. The only winner last night was King Juan Carlos of Spain for his "Jim Robinson from Neighbours" impression. uncanny....

Mediterranean football - balls to it!

Euro 2008. Quarter Finals. Italy versus Spain. The pundits said it would epitomise the ballet of modern football. It turned out to be garbage. Spain went through on penalties, and they did so possessing a set of principals only slightly more attacking than their Italian counterparts, whose game is as negative as it is morally and tactically bankrupt. Not long before, Portugal went out to Germany. France never turned up. The teams of the south, who claim to set the standard for beautiful football, are on the wane. Infuriatingly, some pundits are like stalkers in their obsessive love for Mediterranean football. The sooner they get help, the sooner they may see positive, attacking football is also found north of the Alps. And no amount of tired clichés about German football are going to hide it.

During this European Championship, southern European football went on trial, and Christiano Ronaldo has been the first prisoner marched to the scaffold. Behaving like a play-acting, narcissistic arsehole, he does as much for football as out of season oysters do for encouraging bulimics to keep their food down. The fans of Man United know this by the shabby way he has treated them in his move to Real Madrid. So when Portugal got knocked out of the Euro 2008, I punched the air, wishing he was Patrick Battiston to my Toni Schumacher. When watching Germany versus Portugal, one thing was clear. Germany has a hard task ahead to earn unqualified credit for a new style and attitude that confounds and irritates British pundits. And after the Turkey match, it proved impossible. They’ll always prefer the likes of Ronaldo.

What bothers me is not his skill. He’s got oodles of it, that’s for sure, but I have two problems. One is his dreadful attitude to the game. He spends half a match querying, barracking, harassing officials, then walking away like a petulant schoolboy when being reprimanded for unprofessional and unsporting conduct.

The second problem is watching football with UK commentary. British commentators are so pathologically smitten with Mediterranean football. They don’t look past the fact that it’s long been no more than hype: no style bar some dodgy haircuts, and definitely no substance. Even the BBC, following the epic semi versus a resilient, brilliant Turkey, could have had the decency to say that truly, this was a game for attacking teams, and Germany was one of them, as inventive and frantic upfront as they were wobbly at the back, pound for pound as good as the Turks. No new analysis, no good will.

Typically, there’s mention of the traditional German style – mechanical, efficient, bla bla blah. So when David Pleat admitted that the England team lacked the flair of the Germans, I nearly fell off my chair with laughter. The reality was that Germany played at times with skill and panache. Not that this fact should be surprising. Michael Ballack plays for a top English team. He can do just about anything, from skilful play on the deck, to wreaking havoc in the air. All of which has been improved by thankless trips to Middlesboro and elsewhere. Between Ballack, Jens Lehmann and Thomas Hitzlsperger, there’s a decade’s worth of experience playing in Britain. They know the best and the worst of the English game. A new, positive German game is infused with the running, passing style the Premiership displays week in, week out.

The one player who incorporates old school and new school Germany is Christoph Metzelder. Bearded like Manni Kaltz, he has the heart warming presence of a Bond villain. When he wasn’t steaming with adventure down the middle of the pitch, he was happy kicking lumps out of Portugal players, who were themselves busy lashing out at German players when goal number three found the back of their net. Germany wasn’t blameless in sticking the boot in, no way. The petty chicanery of continental football was there for all to see from both sides.

ITV’s coverage in particular is geared towards casting Germany and Germans as footballing hate-figures. They could play the sexy football of Arsene Wenger and it wouldn’t be good enough, because British pundits don’t see the ooh la la frills of southern European football. German goal number one is the prime example: a goal from nowhere, created in space no greater than Paris Hilton’s waist size, crossed to seemingly to no one, when Bastian Schweinsteiger, tracking the creators Ballack and Podolski on the far side, swung in towards the near post to kung fu-kick the ball into the back of the net. The flair is there, but the commentators were unconvinced. They just saw it as a freak.

When the German team clung on at the end, the whole game was won on grit and determination alone. All the same old stereotypes we’ve heard before were rolled out.

German football has changed drastically in the last five years, reverting to their classic style of the late sixties, embodied by the glorious 1972 team that stuffed England at Wembley. Similarly, Portugal is reverting to the thuggery of 1966, when they all but ended Pele’s World Cup, and could have ended his career. Things always come full circle.

There’s the odd shade of injury time doggedness from Germany, that’s been around since the 1930’s. Still, I prefer that to the childish antics of Ronaldo’s camp, referee-hectoring, Ronald Koeman-style lack of sportsmanship. That, frankly, football can do without. He may have skill, but he’ll never be a great player with that arrogant head on his shoulders. Thank God he’s leaving United. I can hate them a little less next season.

The final will show the truth about football in Europe. That messy as it is, at least Germany have tried their best to have a go. Spain has been underwhelming, and were involved in the most tawdry, tiresome game of this tournament against the discredited Italians. The pressure is on them to show their mettle, just like the media will sweat if their blind spot for good football is put to the test.

Watch out, Sammy's about!!

I tired this morning of Lyric FM's ultra soothing strains of 'Queen for orchestras' laced with Prozac or whatever it was. As I was weaving through the traffic, I had a mental picture of Nurse Rachett in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, her steel blue eyes sharpening as she calls for medication time. Cajoling the inmates of Ireland Mental Hospital into consciousness, I flicked over to the news, which was it's own peculiar medication time, with some very bitter pills to swallow: Take one lost Lisbon treaty (which was eminently winnable for any competent government) followed by the bitterest pill of them all. Sammy bloody Wilson is Norn Iron's environment minister. God help us all, the chief lunatic has the running of the asylum!

Apart form the fact that I bet he can't even spell the word 'environment', it seems that our boy Sammy has a novel idea for Norn Iron's econonmy - let's take in nuclear waste from around the UK in exchange for what he calls 'high paid, high tech jobs'. Very environmental. The jobs in question, it obviously never occurred to him, mount up to the same as being high risk, high paid rubbish dump attendants. Not only will the waste be pretty rank, but it won't stop being fatally toxic ... ever. So unbelievably dangerous and bad is radioactive waste, that when Rapture comes, the Almighty himself will come down with a bad case of radiation poisoning, and the Apocalypse will have to be postponed until his recovery.

Hang on a sec - maybe he's on to something...

...No, on reflection, he's not. He's out of his bloody mind.

It's not surprising that a government official in Ireland comes to a position he neither has an aptitude for nor interest in. Ireland has a great tradition of putting unsuitable people into unsuitable positions of power, particularly in environment and heritage. This is where ministers for years have taken a nickels and dimes attitude to things they should be more mature about, e.g. Tara, the Luas, Wood Quay back in the 70's - the mac daddy of all environmental policy disasters to face our capital.

What is clear is this. With Sammy Wilson's particular brand of madcap policy initiatives, if a China Syndrome doesn't kill us all first, then at least he'll be synchronising the North's policy making idiocy with that of the South - Irish unity is on the way. Thanks to the D.U.P!!