As well as England, there were 31 other teams in Germany, though there were times when the broadcasters struggled with the idea. Taylor Parkes looks at the relentless melange of jingoism and ignorance from Clive, Peter, Garth, Ian and friends
It was Ian Wright, when asked about Serbia & Montenegro’s defensive frailties, who put it in a nutshell. “I don’t really care about all these other games,” he shrugged, looking slightly exasperated. “I only care about England.”
It says a lot about Germany that they managed to reach the 2002 World Cup final in the middle of a prolonged slump but, as Paul Joyce explains, the expectations for this summer’s hosts and poor recent results leave their long-distance coach under pressure
After a 4-1 mauling by Italy in February left Germany without a victory over a top-ranked nation since defeating England at Wembley in October 2000, CDU politician Norbert Barthle demanded that manager Jürgen Klinsmann be hauled before the national sports committee “to explain what his concept is and how Germany can win the World Cup”. With a mere three per cent of the populace believing that a side ranked three places below Iran could now win the tournament, Federal Chancellor Angela Merkel herself felt obliged to give the under-fire Klinsmann the dreaded vote of confidence: she was convinced that he and his team were “on the right path”.
Ugly commercialism aside, Paul Joyce hails the pleasing diet of positive football at the Confederations Cup as well as tentative signs of revival in the German national side
As a dry run for next year’s World Cup finals, the 2005 Confederations Cup had many positive aspects. Not among them, however, was the rampant commercialism that included the sponsoring not only of the 22 player escorts who accompanied the teams onto the pitch, but also of the child carrying the referee’s tossing coin. All vestiges of local cuisine had been removed from the five stadiums. Gone too was FIFA president Sepp Blatter’s original intention of dedicating the tournament to Cameroon’s Marc-Vivien Foé who died of a heart attack at the 2003 Confed-Cup in France.
Daunis Auers was among the Latvia fans following their team of outsiders around Portugal. They might have even stayed a little longer but for a crucial decision by an English referee…
Euro 2004 arrived suddenly and unexpectedly in Latvia. About two weeks before the tournament, the local media began running stories on the national team. They followed the training regime of the players, reported on their choice of cars (Simon Jordan will be pained to hear that the two ex-Crystal Palace players had the nicest ones) and even ran features on the players’ wives.
Matt Nation celebrates an unkempt concrete corner of Hamburg where watching the game was far less entertaining than pushing your neighbours into the nettles – unless a visitor lost his rag
For some ears, Adolf-Jäger-Kampfbahn sounds resolutely and undeniably Teutonic, evoking images of combat drills, marching and Oliver Kahn-lookalikes with their faces set in neutral jumping over vaulting horses. However, in the mid-Nineties, the touchline terrace at Altona 93’s games was more playground than parade ground. People used to go there simply to muck about.