EURO 2008 DIARY DAY 6: GERMANY … 0 ENGLAND … 3 (McLaren vindciated, 63 mins)

A Brazilain scores for Poland, a Pole scores for Germany, a Croat scores for Asutria and - CRAZIEST OF ALL - two Croats score for Croatia!!! Well, I say! Would you Adam and Ivica Olic it?! Little bit gutted that my perennial second national team, the Geeeeymans, took a wee doing today. However, having long ago consigned all my real, proper, genuine 100% kosher pain solely to watching Rangers and Scotland, I was mostly just thrilled by the thrillingness of this thrillsome Day 6. That’s “Day Six: The Thrilling Fields”. Miffed yet chuffed to see Hrvatska doing the biz again through nous and spirit, laughing but cheering when Austria got their pen when they did, how they did, to give them their first goal of the tourney and mostly just delighted to see Monday’s upcoming Teutonic tantazlizer between Deutschland and Osterreich take on Wagnerian proportions.

Half-dozenth day of ERO 2008 and four more teams made their second appearance in the tournament. Only Germany and Croatia remained unchanged on the strip front - only Germany have played two games wearing their traditional home outfit. Austria, now being the only hosts left with any chance of making the quarters, took the traditional all-red of the EURO 2008 hosts from Switzerland but, unlike the Toblerone Loyal from across the border, Asustria also took a point.

Bawbag fuckwit Artur Boruc had a great game, - guaranteeing a move away from Parkhead by denying an all-out attacking Austrian team clearly psyched up by the earlier news from Klagenfurt. Germany losing was cheering enough for the Viennese but knowing that a point against the Poles would ensure AUSTRIA a chance to eliminate Germany from this comepetition, brought to the occassion the closest thing to frenzy yer ever liklely to experience at an Austrian ground.

What a mise-en-scène in the Prater. The Polish fans all in white and red, the Austrians all in red and white and that big inverted wedding cake, the Ernst Happel stadion, bathed in lux-upon-lux of floodlighting and the balmy blue of a setting June sun. The top tier of a wedding cake is the smallest - in the Ernst Happel it’s the widest and every time the camera panned back you got to see that crucial third layer, noseyed under the roof beams. Like the old add-on shelf of terracing atop Hampden’s Celtic End, this topmost part of the Viennese showpiece made the ground seem mountainous rather than simply large. Flags, banners, shirts, scarves and passion rolled down the mountainside into the deep blue sea of the trackside and you didn’t give a fuck about the quality - you just loved the spectacle. You just bathed in the drama. A goal wildly against the run of play - an equalizer in the dying embers of injury time from an attention-seeking decision by an egomaniac referee.

Classic telly!

Howard Webb and one of his assistants look like the doormen you’d find barring yer staggered entrance to an Essex night club. They lok like two members of Right Said Fred. They’re too bulked up - they’re too sunn-tanned. In other words, The English officals at EURO 2008 are too Graham Poll by half. Poland’s goal was a mile off - the linesman had no excuses. Webb refused to book anyone in the first half and booked everyone in the second. Mostly, his note-book was just full of his own story. Just as he thought his chances of reffing the final were dissapearing he made one mad, last dash for glory. A guy called BAK objected wildly to the fact his team-mate had been penalised for pulling the shirt off someone’s back. Hardly. It was nearly as soft as Hugh Dallas’ decision at Parkhead on 2nd May 1999.

Great pen by the oldest guy ever to score in a European Championship finals. Great story in that Ivica Vastic now gets free beer for life from a local brewery as a result of that 93rd minute conversion. What a retirement!

In a tournament which has been cruel to self-coloured strips I suppose all white v all red had to ed in a draw. If both strips sport eagles with spread wings then 1-1 seems inevitable .. if you think that way … aherm! And aren’t the Ernst Happel technical areas the biggest in the history of the game?! The team physios are trained marathon runners - just to get from bench to pitch-side is a 30-minute sprint!

And, as I exaggerate wildly in vain for comic effect I can hear Mark “call a spade a spade” Lawrenson undercutting me with a “D’ye reckon?!” or a “D’ye really think so?” or “ye mean the technical areas are quite big - well why don’t ye just say that then?!” .. “is that a yes or a no?”. What a petulant, sarky, spoilt-childish, pass-remarkable, smart-after-the-fact PAIN IN THE ARSE that man is. 0/10 for him but 4/10 for Guy Mowbray - averaing out at 2/10 for teh pair - for not shoving the microphone up his scrawny Chuckle Borther arse while enduring the MOST SUSTAINED BARRAGE of sarcasm and underwhelm-ment I’ve ever heard on air.

The only more unsettling thing I heard tonight was that Germanic rythmic clapping and chant which I’ve heard at a few Teutonic grounds: “SIEG!” … “SIEG!” …. “SIEG!”.

Mmmm.

But the victory was all Croatia’s in Klagenfurt. The only people more delighted than Slavan Bilic and his team were Peter Drury and Jim Beglin. Apparently it’s now okay that Croatia put England out. If they can beat Germany - AGAIN - then it was almost worth it. Steve McLaren was punditing on Radio Five Live. How on earth did the Beeb pull that off and where on earth did the gormless ginger gaffer get the gutzpah and gumption to turn up at this game after the garbage he put up against the Croats at Wembley? Still, at least McLaren has managed to some level. Beglin and Drury’s orgasmic rature at the sight of someone else’s country turning over yet another team who’d done them at Wembley recently, was based entirely on myopia and bigotry.

The sickening aspect of the commentary is how much they revel in attributing the Germans with purely English media hubris: Apparently the Nationalmannschaft had been “boasting” about their strike force before the tournament? Erm - naw. The German’s NEVER boast before a tournament. It’s against German law. England, however …

The ITV prats - 1/10 - were also determined that this result was a SHOCK. Well, how come I’ve got a tenner on Croatia to win the tournament as well as £30.00 on Germany??!! I was at the last Germany-Croatia game in the Euros, at Old Trafford. It also finished 2-1 with a red card chucked in. Inbetween times Croatia pumped Germany enroute to finishing third at a world cup. Anyone who PAYS ANY ATTENTION WHATSOEVER to football outside their own national team will know Croatia have a level of inate technical ability, spirit and tactical awareness which makes them even money to beat ANY SIDE IN THE WORLD, ANYWHERE, ANY TIME.

Thought it was sickening how Jerko Leko held his face after Schweini - Germany’s best player by a mile for the two seconds he was on the pitch - gave him a shove in the neck. Thought it was hilarious how, on his way off, big Bastian had a look at Slaven Bilic - the most infamous face-clutcher of them all - and made a wee “You’re cuckoo” sign towards him: Ye could see Schweinsteiger clearly think about having a more proximitous pop at Bilic and then ye could see him clearly think “Naw. That cunt really IS cuckoo - I’ll just keep walking”.

Ye can never write off The Germans - unless, of course, the final whistle’s just gone and they’ve lost 2-1 - and they’re as well to get the set-back now as in the knock-out stages. We wont see Marcell Jansen again, Wee Lahm will stay at left back for the rest of the tourney and, personally, I’d give Timo Hildebrand a shot between the sticks. Lehmann was defo to blame for the second goal and is also a red card waiting to happen as he lacks the pace needed for the six-to-eighteen-yard dashes necessitated by Germany’s high defensive line and slow centre halves. Mind you - my opinions are scheisse. The fiver I put on Mario Gomez for top-scorer must be the biggest jinx of all time. He’s alchemy in reverse - a pot of striking gold turned to a pan-full of useless shite. Even in the win over Poland, Gomez was horrendous. Sorry, big man - mea culpa.

But the neutrals were the biggest winners today. Not only was Hrvatska-Deutschland a classic and Osterreich-Polska dramatic but we now have one belter of a final night to look forward to in Group B; It’s time the whole world was focussed on an Austria-Germany game. We know England hate them and we know Holland hate them … as well as the French, Poles, Czechs, Russians … and a few other emerging nations. Germany are a lot of people’s derby. But Austria, long before Holland, were Germany’s derby. This’ll be massive.

Quick word on Monday: For the first half of the 20th century, Austria held footbaling sway over Germany. The stereotype was that the Austrians played Danubian football - the Scottish short-passing game - while the Germans played coarse, English-style lump-and-chase tactics. The Austrians and Germans were, of course, forced together for a short period in the thirties and forties - they all fucking hated each other in the dressing room - and they’ve hated each other ever since. When the Anschluss was commemorated by a Germany-Austria game at The Prater (now the Ernst Happel, scene of today’s second match), Mathias Sindelar of Asutria tore the Third Reich XI a new one. Sindelar was Jewish, Sindelar was brilliant. He was skinny as an x-ray to boot, loved to smoke drink and whore about - he was the very antithesis of Aryan purity. But he tore dem poor Schalke and Nuremberg players who had to represent the Nazi’s a new one when he’d been advised in the dressing room not to. When Sindelar and his grilfirend were found dead in his flat of gas poisoning a year or so later … well - some Germans think it was an accident, most Austrians don’t.

In the 1934 World Cup, the famous Austrian Wunderteam, containing Sindelar, lost the third/fourth place play off to the Germany of Szepan (yup - Polish descended!). That went against the grain. That irked the Imperious Austrians. But the Germans, sick of being condesecended to about the superior Austrian style, saved their best for the 1954 Wiorld Cup semi-final: Playing Austria IN SWITZERLAND, West Germany, as they were newly called, weren’t much fancied to beat their “technically superior” neighbours in Basle. A nation devestated with the defeat and guilt of the Second World War, listened on their home-made radios as West Germany won 6-1. If you ever get to see the 2004 film Das Wunder Von Bern - the Miracle of Bern (I’ll give ye a loan of), ye’ll be unable to watch the scene pertaining to this classic moment in German football without greeting yer fekin eyes out. Director Sönke Wortmann shows war-damaged kids knocking a rag ball about on a North-Rhine Westphalian bomb site while playing the actual radio commentary from the game … the AUSTRIAN commentary. No wonder they invented the term Schadenfreude in that part of the world.

1978 in Cordoba, Argentina and Austria get a bit of revenge. Probably the most memorable Austrian victory of the latter half of the 20th century came in a situation which, had Poland won tonight, would have been repeated on Monday of next week. In the second round group stage of the Argentine World Cup, Austria lost their first two games and were already out by the time they played West Germany, holders of the trophy, who required a win to make the final. Austria won 3-2, Hans Krankl was amazing and the Austrian commentators, this time, were seriously more upbeat. Schadenfreude, right back at ya!

What happened in 1982 in Spain, is anybody’s guess. Well, we all know both teams conspired super-cynically to eliminate Algeria but why Austria, four years after soooo enjoying such sweet success against the Germans in a World Cup, decided to help them out in Gijon is one of life’s great mysteries. Needless to say, with ITV’s Ned Boulting only last night sporting a shirt designed by Austrian legend Toni Polster which itself bore testimony to Cordoba 1978, we can only look forward to Monday and the most intense atmosphere experienced at the Ernst Happel since … well maybe since a wee skinny Jewish bloke didnae do what he was told.

Oh and there are always huge rammies about who gets to wear their home strip. Why have Germany ditched the green …? Why?!!

EURO 2008 Microphone League standings after Day 6 (This is including the results of yesterday’s free pole which saw Tyldesley & Pleat and Steve “Whatshisface” Wilson & Mark Bright both score 3/10 for their Day 5 contributions to broadcasting excellence):

Tyldseley&Pleat - 13/30

Whatshisface Wilson&Peacok - 4/10

Whatshisface Wilson&Bright - 7/20

Motson&Bright - 3/10

Mowbray&Lawrenson - 2/10

Drury&Beglin - 1/20

Pearce&Lawrenson - 0/20

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Published:
06.12.08 / 10pm
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