VIRIATO
Command Sergeant Major
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Yes Brad, I've only caught a few glimpses of the game but especially Henri looks very far from his Arsenal times and there is no Zizou anymore. They are probably going out.
Euro 2008 (1 Viewer)
- Thread starter Saber
- Start date
Yes Brad, I've only caught a few glimpses of the game but especially Henri looks very far from his Arsenal times and there is no Zizou anymore. They are probably going out.
Cardigan600
Memoriam Member
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Yo Brad, fully deserved to win, they were trying to win the game, Sweden, were playing for draw and boring to watch, for me they all have to beat the Dutch & Croatia to win.
Bernard.
nasirkasmani
Sergeant Major
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hi guys,
this article abound germany's performance versus poland is about 3 days late, (and before they lost to croatia), but its a great article, so of you have time, do read it. -
Wishing We Were More Like The Germans
Posted 09/06/08 12:38
I was brought up to be suspicious of Germans.
Like many kids raised in the 60s by parents who had fought the Nazis, the Germans were sold to us as the embodiment of everything we should not be. They were cold, humourless, ruthless, emotionless, violent, cruel, aggressive egotists who were soft enough in the head to be brainwashed by dictators.
My dad actually killed hundreds, if not thousands of Germans; slaughtered them on the fields of El Alamein as a gunner in the Desert Rats. It was his job to use the intelligence to estimate where Rommel's lads were. If he got it right, the shells wiped them out, if he got it wrong, their shells wiped him out. It was the devil's gameshow.
The 8th Army were victorious. They killed then captured thousands of German troops and on seeing long lines of them filing into camp Dad said, 'They were just like me and my mates, young and very scared...there was no difference, it was only the war that said they were our enemies...but they weren't, not really. They'd just been told to do something and they'd done it. Same as us.'
When he told me this, I was 16 and in those 16 years he had refused to ever say anything about the war and he refused thereafter to comment again. He'd thrown away his medals because he thought 'the whole thing, Churchill, Hilter, the lot of them...all bloody rubbish...a waste of life.'
It was one afternoon out of thousands of afternoons but it was the only afternoon he ever talked about the war to me. He died ten years later still over-focused on those six years of his life but never having talked about those six years again.
You'd have thought his battlefield realisation would have made him less anti-German in the rest of his life but as is the contradictory nature of the human psyche, the opposite happened. He was obsessed with war movies, with books about Hitler, with anything to do with the Nazi's. The war had changed his life profoundly. 20 years on I now suspect having gone through the war from the age of 18-25, it traumatized him utterly and for life.
He never got over it, never learned how to deal with it and the result was anything or anyone, not only German, but simply not English, he was highly suspicious of. This was perhaps an emotional retreat to try and deal with what he had seen and done.
Consequently, he and my mother were casual racists of the first water. Blacks were lazy and sexually profligate - the phrase, 'they've just come down out of the trees' was incredibly often uttered in our household.
Asians were dirty - 'have you smelled their food?!' The Chinese were sinister and cruel - 'All that opium and they eat dogs our John!' Scandanavians were morally bankrupt - 'everything's about sex with them', mother said one day apropo of nothing. Anyone from the Middle East was hysterical - 'it's all that garlic & chilli', dad would say, 'it sends them daft...same as it does the French.'
Needless to say, these opinions were formed not by personal experience but instead by the news and film media of the time. So much so that my mother made an exception in her racism for Sidney Poitier - 'he's alright, he's obviously educated.'
As a working class northern kid this was not an untypical experience but recalling it now, it still really shocks me. England was the centre of the world to our parents and to us. Everything adults told us came through this messed-up war-time filter. And none more so than when it came to football.
When England beat West Germany in 1966, be under no mistake, for everyone over the age of 20, that was us winning the war again. It was the reassertion of good old honest British spirit. The Hun had taken a beating again. All was right with the world.
So when we lost to West Germany in 1970 to the older generation it was like losing a battle in the war. And in 1972 when West Germany beat us 3-1 at Wembley for the first time, all pride and self respect was finally lost. To my dad it was as though we had finally succumbed to the Nazi's.
While no-one would have articulated it exactly like that, underneath, this was the narrative that existed, despite the fact that this was a time of brilliant Kraut-rock as bearded students embraced the nihilist, electronic experimentalism of Tangerine Dream, Amon Dull II, and Kraftwerk. My mothers response? 'That's just noise our John. It's not for the like of us.' I bought 'Ricochet' by the Tangs immediately. It's brilliant.
So now, as I stand before you naked as a razor, I am about to say something that would have profoundly upset my parents and all their contemporaries.
I wish we were German; when it comes to football anyway. This was heresy when I was a kid.
However, today I see a German national side that is ironically everything that English football used to proclaim itself to be. It is mentally strong, it works hard, it knocks it wide quickly, gets it forward as soon as possible and presses the ball when it loses possession. In short, the 2008 German football team plays the game the English way. Only they are successful. Dad would have despaired.
Watching them play Poland illustrated it perfectly. Even when they were not dominant, and had less possession of the ball than Poland, they didn't panic, they remained in control. They had confidence and self belief.
By contrast when England surrender possession they go into panic, last-gasp defending mode. It's been this way since 1970. The Germans currnetly don't seem to have prima-donnas or over-inflated egos, which is also something the English were once proud of. Vanity and preening was for untrustworthy foreigners.
But if they occasionally do, as with Lehmann's eccentricities, it manifests itself as a form of genuine lunacy rather than the self regarding smugness that infests English football.
When Podolski buried his volley to put Germany 2-0 up, the consummate ease with which he did so was admirable as was his dignified reaction to scoring against his home nation.
Had Rooney or one of his English contemporaries hit that volley, the British media would have gone off the scale in its adoration, proclaiming this man a giant amongst men - a genius footballer. To Podolski it looked like hey, its my job, it's what I do. In other words, a more rational response.
Their attitude is so much better than England's attitudes. When a German player knocks a long ball forward and it's over-hit and goes out of play, the forward doesn't applaud the man who tried to pass it to him. Why should he? He failed.
Contrast this to England, were every single pass is applauded by the potential receiver regardless of the hapless inaccuracy or otherwise. It is as though we have become a nation of apologists for mediocrity.
The Germans are who I want England to be. Not perfect, not brilliant, but efficient, plucky, calm, solid and well organised. Not ego maniacs. Not super-models. Men who we can respect. Men of integrity and worth. I want a coach like Joachim Low, who is able to change players, to re-organize them to better effect, rather than surrender to fate.
Steve McClaren was on co-commentary duty for 5live for the Austria v Croatia game on Sunday. Croatia, tiring and surrendering possession were under the cosh of a revitalized Austria. 'I've been in games like this, 'said McClaren, 'as a manager there's nothing much you can do...you've made your substitutions...you've just got to hope the players deliver.'
I stood jaw agape at this. He had subconsciously revealed the English football mind set; in thrall to fate, already surrendered to the inevitable, hands off the wheel, cross your fingers and hope for the best.
It said so much about what the English way has become. And at a time when so many international stars are flocking to the Premier League, it is surely significant that Ballack is now the only German in the squad that plays here. English football seems to offer little attraction for these players. Indeed, only three of squad will play outside of Germany next season. Maybe that's why they're so good. Maybe it's why they have such a good attitude, maybe it's why they are successful. The Germans are not just better than England, they're easier to admire.
So that's why I wish England was Germany. Dad would have been appalled, though perhaps not as appalled as he would have been by England.
this article abound germany's performance versus poland is about 3 days late, (and before they lost to croatia), but its a great article, so of you have time, do read it. -
Wishing We Were More Like The Germans
Posted 09/06/08 12:38
I was brought up to be suspicious of Germans.
Like many kids raised in the 60s by parents who had fought the Nazis, the Germans were sold to us as the embodiment of everything we should not be. They were cold, humourless, ruthless, emotionless, violent, cruel, aggressive egotists who were soft enough in the head to be brainwashed by dictators.
My dad actually killed hundreds, if not thousands of Germans; slaughtered them on the fields of El Alamein as a gunner in the Desert Rats. It was his job to use the intelligence to estimate where Rommel's lads were. If he got it right, the shells wiped them out, if he got it wrong, their shells wiped him out. It was the devil's gameshow.
The 8th Army were victorious. They killed then captured thousands of German troops and on seeing long lines of them filing into camp Dad said, 'They were just like me and my mates, young and very scared...there was no difference, it was only the war that said they were our enemies...but they weren't, not really. They'd just been told to do something and they'd done it. Same as us.'
When he told me this, I was 16 and in those 16 years he had refused to ever say anything about the war and he refused thereafter to comment again. He'd thrown away his medals because he thought 'the whole thing, Churchill, Hilter, the lot of them...all bloody rubbish...a waste of life.'
It was one afternoon out of thousands of afternoons but it was the only afternoon he ever talked about the war to me. He died ten years later still over-focused on those six years of his life but never having talked about those six years again.
You'd have thought his battlefield realisation would have made him less anti-German in the rest of his life but as is the contradictory nature of the human psyche, the opposite happened. He was obsessed with war movies, with books about Hitler, with anything to do with the Nazi's. The war had changed his life profoundly. 20 years on I now suspect having gone through the war from the age of 18-25, it traumatized him utterly and for life.
He never got over it, never learned how to deal with it and the result was anything or anyone, not only German, but simply not English, he was highly suspicious of. This was perhaps an emotional retreat to try and deal with what he had seen and done.
Consequently, he and my mother were casual racists of the first water. Blacks were lazy and sexually profligate - the phrase, 'they've just come down out of the trees' was incredibly often uttered in our household.
Asians were dirty - 'have you smelled their food?!' The Chinese were sinister and cruel - 'All that opium and they eat dogs our John!' Scandanavians were morally bankrupt - 'everything's about sex with them', mother said one day apropo of nothing. Anyone from the Middle East was hysterical - 'it's all that garlic & chilli', dad would say, 'it sends them daft...same as it does the French.'
Needless to say, these opinions were formed not by personal experience but instead by the news and film media of the time. So much so that my mother made an exception in her racism for Sidney Poitier - 'he's alright, he's obviously educated.'
As a working class northern kid this was not an untypical experience but recalling it now, it still really shocks me. England was the centre of the world to our parents and to us. Everything adults told us came through this messed-up war-time filter. And none more so than when it came to football.
When England beat West Germany in 1966, be under no mistake, for everyone over the age of 20, that was us winning the war again. It was the reassertion of good old honest British spirit. The Hun had taken a beating again. All was right with the world.
So when we lost to West Germany in 1970 to the older generation it was like losing a battle in the war. And in 1972 when West Germany beat us 3-1 at Wembley for the first time, all pride and self respect was finally lost. To my dad it was as though we had finally succumbed to the Nazi's.
While no-one would have articulated it exactly like that, underneath, this was the narrative that existed, despite the fact that this was a time of brilliant Kraut-rock as bearded students embraced the nihilist, electronic experimentalism of Tangerine Dream, Amon Dull II, and Kraftwerk. My mothers response? 'That's just noise our John. It's not for the like of us.' I bought 'Ricochet' by the Tangs immediately. It's brilliant.
So now, as I stand before you naked as a razor, I am about to say something that would have profoundly upset my parents and all their contemporaries.
I wish we were German; when it comes to football anyway. This was heresy when I was a kid.
However, today I see a German national side that is ironically everything that English football used to proclaim itself to be. It is mentally strong, it works hard, it knocks it wide quickly, gets it forward as soon as possible and presses the ball when it loses possession. In short, the 2008 German football team plays the game the English way. Only they are successful. Dad would have despaired.
Watching them play Poland illustrated it perfectly. Even when they were not dominant, and had less possession of the ball than Poland, they didn't panic, they remained in control. They had confidence and self belief.
By contrast when England surrender possession they go into panic, last-gasp defending mode. It's been this way since 1970. The Germans currnetly don't seem to have prima-donnas or over-inflated egos, which is also something the English were once proud of. Vanity and preening was for untrustworthy foreigners.
But if they occasionally do, as with Lehmann's eccentricities, it manifests itself as a form of genuine lunacy rather than the self regarding smugness that infests English football.
When Podolski buried his volley to put Germany 2-0 up, the consummate ease with which he did so was admirable as was his dignified reaction to scoring against his home nation.
Had Rooney or one of his English contemporaries hit that volley, the British media would have gone off the scale in its adoration, proclaiming this man a giant amongst men - a genius footballer. To Podolski it looked like hey, its my job, it's what I do. In other words, a more rational response.
Their attitude is so much better than England's attitudes. When a German player knocks a long ball forward and it's over-hit and goes out of play, the forward doesn't applaud the man who tried to pass it to him. Why should he? He failed.
Contrast this to England, were every single pass is applauded by the potential receiver regardless of the hapless inaccuracy or otherwise. It is as though we have become a nation of apologists for mediocrity.
The Germans are who I want England to be. Not perfect, not brilliant, but efficient, plucky, calm, solid and well organised. Not ego maniacs. Not super-models. Men who we can respect. Men of integrity and worth. I want a coach like Joachim Low, who is able to change players, to re-organize them to better effect, rather than surrender to fate.
Steve McClaren was on co-commentary duty for 5live for the Austria v Croatia game on Sunday. Croatia, tiring and surrendering possession were under the cosh of a revitalized Austria. 'I've been in games like this, 'said McClaren, 'as a manager there's nothing much you can do...you've made your substitutions...you've just got to hope the players deliver.'
I stood jaw agape at this. He had subconsciously revealed the English football mind set; in thrall to fate, already surrendered to the inevitable, hands off the wheel, cross your fingers and hope for the best.
It said so much about what the English way has become. And at a time when so many international stars are flocking to the Premier League, it is surely significant that Ballack is now the only German in the squad that plays here. English football seems to offer little attraction for these players. Indeed, only three of squad will play outside of Germany next season. Maybe that's why they're so good. Maybe it's why they have such a good attitude, maybe it's why they are successful. The Germans are not just better than England, they're easier to admire.
So that's why I wish England was Germany. Dad would have been appalled, though perhaps not as appalled as he would have been by England.
VIRIATO
Command Sergeant Major
- Joined
- Apr 28, 2005
- Messages
- 2,393
Hi,
I'd like to thank you for this post. Honest and open thoughts, whether you agree or not, really these sport things sometimes seem to be a continuing of war through other means, and some press is only too happy to bolster those feelings. National psyche is always behind these big events, sometimes healthily, sometimes not.
On Germany and England, I am not sure Germany's advantage has to do with character, different English and German players have different characters and it can be dangerous to make general assumptions. But I would agree that the Premiership is overvalued and that the English team never delivers the goods, although there are definitely some great British players ( not as many as in the golden eighties, for instance, though, remember Hoddle or Keegan or Dalglish? ). But of one thing I am pretty sure: German players have overcome the British when it comes to technical skills, and this since the seventies you mention: the average technical level of the German team is quite superior to the English ( let alone the other British teams ). Maybe the English should come to grips with this fact, and overcome it, but first the football people in Britain should be modest enough to acknowledge it and then change it.
I can enjoy different footballing styles and cultures, like both Germany and Brazil, when they both play well. And I normally have some simpathy for English football ( which comes from the old seventies and eighties Liverpool teams ). I have never seen anything even remotely close to the best Brazilian teams though ( and that includes my Portugal ), they have the utmost talent but obviously they would get nowhere without the hard work.
Now, please excuse me for all this crap, I really am just an amateur wild guessing about football, but well, I like it so here are my 2 cents
Regards,
Paulo
I'd like to thank you for this post. Honest and open thoughts, whether you agree or not, really these sport things sometimes seem to be a continuing of war through other means, and some press is only too happy to bolster those feelings. National psyche is always behind these big events, sometimes healthily, sometimes not.
On Germany and England, I am not sure Germany's advantage has to do with character, different English and German players have different characters and it can be dangerous to make general assumptions. But I would agree that the Premiership is overvalued and that the English team never delivers the goods, although there are definitely some great British players ( not as many as in the golden eighties, for instance, though, remember Hoddle or Keegan or Dalglish? ). But of one thing I am pretty sure: German players have overcome the British when it comes to technical skills, and this since the seventies you mention: the average technical level of the German team is quite superior to the English ( let alone the other British teams ). Maybe the English should come to grips with this fact, and overcome it, but first the football people in Britain should be modest enough to acknowledge it and then change it.
I can enjoy different footballing styles and cultures, like both Germany and Brazil, when they both play well. And I normally have some simpathy for English football ( which comes from the old seventies and eighties Liverpool teams ). I have never seen anything even remotely close to the best Brazilian teams though ( and that includes my Portugal ), they have the utmost talent but obviously they would get nowhere without the hard work.
Now, please excuse me for all this crap, I really am just an amateur wild guessing about football, but well, I like it so here are my 2 cents
Regards,
Paulo
damian
1st Lieutenant
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From what I can see it seems that in football it is the club competions that are more important than the national teams. There is more money in the clubs and the players are more passionate about their clubs. In rugby it is the international teams such as teh Springboks and All Blacks that have more of a brand name than any club side.
Regards
Damian
Regards
Damian
jazzeum
Four Star General
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It's kind of difficult to compare the Premiership with the national team because so many non-English players make up the Premiership these days. Perhaps that hurts the English team. Of the principal leagues, the Premiership, the Bundesliga, La Liga and Serie A, the Premiership is probably the best because of its diversity, followed by La Liga. The Bundesliga football is not where it used to be compared to the other leagues but maybe that helps them in the end.
debrito
Command Sergeant Major
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France is one guy team, Zidane in 98 and 2006 that is all. In the 82 world cup in Spain, France was great; with the captain Michel Platine they played very well and was so far the best French team in history. In 2006 and specialty in 2002 the French was very disorganized and had no good strikers, they left the competition without scored a goal, like Greece today. I know that I am suspicious to talk about France, last time Brazil won against France it was 52 years ago…..
J’aime beaucoup les français, mais je déteste l’équipe de foot française. I like very much the French people but i don’t like this team…
Rod.
jazzeum
Four Star General
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Rod,
That 82 game between France and Germany, that was a douzy, one of the better matches I've ever had the pleasure to see, a real cracker.
Of course, nothing to the 1970 World Cup final and here is a neat video, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R3yq2wSSXpE
That 82 game between France and Germany, that was a douzy, one of the better matches I've ever had the pleasure to see, a real cracker.
Of course, nothing to the 1970 World Cup final and here is a neat video, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R3yq2wSSXpE
VIRIATO
Command Sergeant Major
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Great videos, great memories, many thanks for the link.
debrito
Command Sergeant Major
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Cardigan600
Memoriam Member
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Yo Brad, easy Czeck mate.
Bernard.
Bernard.
damian
1st Lieutenant
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Most football finals these days seem to be dull affairs. Both teams playing defensively and relying on the old penalty shoot out to decide things. Maybe they should simply have a sudden death type playoff after full time. You know 15 minutes either way the first team to score wins.
Cardigan600
Memoriam Member
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Yo Trooper, they tried this out a few years back Damian, sudden death extra time, but it went down like a lead balloon, so it was chucked out and went back to the penalty rule which was deemed the fairest way.
Bernard.
Bernard.
redhugh
Master Sergeant
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The best tournament I remember is the 1982 world cup , with Zico and Socrates even though Brazil didn't go on to win, the bicycle kick goals and flair of the team was a delight to watch, there have been special moments in subsequent world cups but the Brazilians that year were something else
debrito
Command Sergeant Major
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The best tournament I remember is the 1982 world cup , with Zico and Socrates even though Brazil didn't go on to win, the bicycle kick goals and flair of the team was a delight to watch, there have been special moments in subsequent world cups but the Brazilians that year were something else
But Paolo Rossi messed out the party, Italy 3 X 2 Brazil......
debrito
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Damian, in football we are allowed to change 3 players per game only. After 120 minutes (OT added) running your legs start to be weak and cramps are easily developed. This is one of the reasons they decided to return to penalty.
Rod.