John Champion: Wee Dick (Fat Eck’s EURO 2004 Diary, Match Day 12)

Wednesday June 23rd 2004
Group D

CZECH REPUBLIC … 2 GERMANY … 1
NETHERLANDS … 3 LATVIA … 0

Sometime last year, the best kebab shop in the northern hemisphere, Cafe India on Great Western Road, Glasgow, changed its layout. I was gutted. So was Cafe India - by some shop design team who’d decided to whip out the formica-topped counter and the brutalist metal surfaces scorched with the flames of post-pub delight. It had been, for me, a cold, hard functionalism producer of savoury necessities. There was nothing but the customer and the product and the product was always great. Now it has a fancy-shmancey blue-tiled, “med-it-er-anian” look, with a lovely presentation case advertising all its wares. The boy doing the nan bread with a blow torch is now shoved way up the back, out of the public’s site. The staff used to know me - they used to say “everything on?” when I ordered my Donner in Ayrshireese. Now they ask me if I want “salad and sauce”. (What am I - a fu**ing mirage??! … you got me on a pay-no-mind list??!! …”)

Nothing in life is immune to change. No mainstay of enjoyment will be so forever. The Germans used to be “West Germans”. They had a horrible wall down the middle of their old capital city, they had the Badder Meinhoff and they had Soviet-trained guards and nuclear warheads ready to pounce on them if the Warsaw Pact decreed it necessary. BUT they also had Kraftwerk, they had the Bauhaus and they had football which never lost. Well, almost never.

Kraftwerk played Glasgow a few months ago and the Bauhaus archive was doing pretty damn well in Berlin, when I was there in October. But the football of the young, swanky, fancy-dan “Germany” is going seriously downhill. When I were a nipper, West Germany would go to other people’s countries and win their football tournaments. Now, as they prepare to host the biggest tourney of them all, the Deutscher Fussball-Bund Nationalmannschaft is in freefall.

They still knocked Scotland out of EURO 2004, mind. And, even though I was proud as punch when we drew with them at Hampden a year ago and even prouder of Christain Daily for caling thenm “FU**ING DIVIN’ CHEATS!!!” in the tunell of the West Phalia Stadium in Dortmund, I was also pretty thrilled atthe excuse I’d been given to watch Germany in the flesh once more. As a Scotland fan, even when we get to a finals, we never get out the group stages, so half of the teams taking part in any summer tournament always progress farther than us. We’re so bad we have to sit back and admire three rest of the competition. We’ve learned how to do that. In short, we’re fans of football.

And football teams don’t come much more sucessful than the Germans. Seven appearances in the final match of the World Cup; three times champions; the last time they failed to make the actual FINALS was more than half a century ago and let’s just say that wasn’t for lack of a football side (They won the first World Cup they were allowed to enter after the war, in 1954). In the European championships, Germany are just as dominant. Three times winners, twice more runners-up and the last time they failed to make the finals was one year before I was born - 1968!

That year, by coincidence, was the first of only two occasions in which England have reached the European Championship semis - the furthest the FA’s ever gone in the continent’s premier competition. So, it was the days of black and white TV, quite literally, when England last progressed further than Germany in ANY competition. No wonder John Champion was openly ecstatic when Milan Baros slipped in the winning goal for the Czechs at the Jose Alvalade stadium tonight. It will probably only last 24 hours, but England ARE staying in Portugal longer than the Germans. They only face Argentina and Brazil every four years so the biannual sight of the Germans doing better than them has bred a contemptuous familiarity for the DFB among English myopes. As one tournament after another for four decades fails to see England reach a final, never mind win something, the ease with which the Germans - never more technically gifted, en masse, than their British cousins - win, win, win is bound to twist your mellon, man.

It’s a sign of inadequacy when you crow so hard at the sight of someone else doing something you can’t but the Czechs may as well have been playing in white shirts with three lions on the badge (instead of red shirts with just the two lions!) as our broadcaster for the evening wet himself. Champion had probably been the best up until tonight. He sang the praises of the SPL and Henrik Larsson last week and his moments of xenophobia were few and far between - even if they were dazzling:”Don’t worry - there’s some Premiership players involved in this game” - and tonight he actually introduced us to a new collective noun - a “bench of substitutes”. However, in an effort to sell yet another game not featuring England (why ARE so many of the games allowed to do that???!!) the unspoken ITV tag-line for tonight’s show was, “watch Germany get knocked out by the Czech reserves”.

He virtualy SUNG “Auf Wiedersehen” when Baros outstripped Worns and Nowotny at Poborsky’s bidding and took two shots at beating Kahn, the second successful. This was in the 76th minute, however, and if Champion had been allowed to go against the grain, he might have mentioned Germany are the only team to come back from two goals down in the final game of three major tournaments. He might have said that Germany are, in fact, the come-back kings (Wolfgang Webber - last minute of normal time at Wembley in 1966!). Quarter of an hour to score two goals is more than enough for Deutschland - usually - but the commentators can’t take any chances. The viewers had to be assured that the sausage-munchers would be going out - we couldnt have anyone switching off for fear of witnessing yet another German victory.

For the next quarter of an hour it was talk of how Rudi Voeller’s team “needed a miracle”, “were definitely out”, this was their “last throw of the dice” etc. Only when a minute of stoppage time remained and the Czechs still led, did Champion finally mention the fact Germany are the most successful nation EVER in European international football.

Germany were raucously added to the list of the “mighty” who have have fallen in this tournament. In truth they are the least mighty in terms of personnel. It’s their indian sign over England and the heavy weight of their footballing history which, now they’re gone, makes folks south of Hadrian’s wall belive that - along with the elimination of Italy and Spain at the group stage - England may just have a chance of lifting a trophy for the first time in nearly forty years.

The Dresden Frauenkirche was yesterday topped with a British-designed Cupola - an act of reconciliation for the carpet-bombing of Helmut Schoen’s home town during World War II. Perhaps the Henri Delaunay trophy on the FA mantelpiece will finally stop England’s commentators aspiring to the ideals of Bomber Harris.

Germany had to beat the Czechs to be guaranteed to progress and a draw would maybe see them through if Latvia continued their good form against the Dutch in the Braga quarry. We were continually reminded this was the Czech RESERVE team, so the embarrasment to Germany would be greater in the event of elimination. With Poborsky, Koller, Baros, Petr Cech, and Nedved all missing from the starting line-up which smote the Dutch on Saturday, ITV had a point. It was their fawning over the point which so nauseated

An early mistake by the Czechs allowed Bastian Schweinsteiger to lay off to Bayern team-mate Michael Ballack at the edge of the box. A left-footed volley nestled itself in the topcorner of the Czech net and both my bet on Germany to win the tournament (