depression yesterday after seeing its soccer dreams thwarted
by Manchester United.
Television news cameras panned around the empty Olympic
Stadium in Munich where more than 40,000 fans had been
cheering and chanting as they watched Wednesday night's
European Championship final on a huge screen.
When the game was snatched from Bayern Munich in the last
120 seconds, the mood switched, tears coursed down thousands
of faces, and television coverage yesterday was accompanied
by funeral music.
Absenteeism in Bavarian offices was unusually high
yesterday, rivalling the Friday before a Bank Holiday. "We
have had an attack of Manchester flu," an insurance company
personnel officer said.
This particular bout of flu will be difficult to shake off.
Unable to blame the ref, lacking the German phrase for "we
wuz robbed", Germans raged against the Nordic god of
football.
Franz Beckenbauer, president of the Munich club, said at the
traditional post-match dinner: "It's difficult to talk, the
full cruelty of football has hit us." More controversially,
he added: "We have lost a battle, we won't commit suicide,
we have to keep our nerves - we simply lost a game."
Nothing could be further from the truth. No sporting
encounter between England and Germany is simply a game. For
the British, the Champions League final conformed to the
caricature of sporting contacts with Germany as a test of
national character.
In the eyes of the bar-room philosopher, the disorganised
British lose early against the disciplined, strategically
minded Germans and then, through brilliant improvisation (or
stamina), win in the end. Two World Wars are held to be
evidence of this, and football is regarded as war by other
means. Wembley 1966 is still a benchmark for popular
culture.
But the fact is that disorganised sportsmen, like
disorganised generals, just lose. And Germans, for all their
discipline and competence, are capable of throwing away
seemingly sure-fire victories.
The German bar-room philosopher is already coming to the
view that the country may be on a losing streak. Hans
Heuser, my local publican, thinks there could be such a
thing as too much discipline. "If it leads to over-
confidence, you drop your guard and that's that. We have to
learn this lesson."
Germany is the most insured nation in the world, Germans
book their holidays a year in advance; they are not the kind
of nation given to scoring last-minute goals. Perhaps that
will have to change