first semi final

For the
last couple of days I have been licking my wounds – of course I got the line-up
for the semi-finals wrong and thanks to those readers who were kind enough to
point it out; but, having thought about it, it doesn’t matter too much.  On Wednesday Spain will beat Portugal in Donetsk and, on Thursday Germany will take care of Italy in Warsaw. 





The two
winners will reconvene in Kiev (only 132 kilometres from Chernobyl in case you have forgotten) for the
final.  What a shame that the Great Gate of
Kiev in Victor Hartmann’s painting remains a figment of someone’s creative
imagination and has anyone thought to use Modest Mussorgsky’s great theme as
music to introduce a highlights show of the final?




One of my
readers suggested that references to Hong Kong football were inappropriate because the
ex-colony doesn’t have any international status.  Maybe that’s the point.  Players there have no immediate geographical
role models.  The Chinese national team
is hardly in the upper echelons of world football (although Spain only beat them 1-0 just before Euro
2012 so they can’t be too bad).  Football
fanatics from the New Territories only care about playing the beautiful game
with a smile on their faces even though, of course, as fans, they are
aficionados of the European game and tune in late at night (currently there’s a
seven hour time difference between London and China) to watch the English
Premier League, the Spanish La Liga, Italy’s Serie A and Germany’s
Bundesliga.  Uefa nations have a
responsibility to represent our game to the world as something worthy as well
as exciting.




I grow
tired of the play-acting that takes place these days when players of undoubted
footballing skill regard it almost as important, in order to gain the
ascendancy in a game to get opponents dismissed as they do to outplay the other
team and to score more goals.  Too often
we see highly trained athletes tumbling to the ground.  For those actors who want to know how to go
down feigning real injury they need look no further than the footage of Fabrice
Muamba collapsing against Spurs a few weeks ago.  The secret to being convincing is to remain
totally still and not to do a triple salchow on the way down as if to invite us
all to give marks out of ten for artistic interpretation.  How good, by the way, it is to see that young
man making good progress towards recovery.




And what of
the match-up between the two Iberian nations? 
Their contiguity makes a strong rivalry inevitable but, although Portugal are a decent enough team (better than
England for example) it is expecting too much of them
to think that they will overcome that class of genius that is the current
Spanish team.  Ronaldo is both their
strength and their weakness.  Their
strength because he is a superb player; their weakness because he seems to
concentrate too much on his own destiny and not enough on his team’s.  Here’s a novel idea; why not let Fernando
Torres play the whole 90 minutes.  He is
sharper now than he has been since incurring the injury that required surgery whilst
still with Liverpool. 
He is threatening to get back to the same razor sharp standard that he
displayed that day at Old Trafford against Manchester United when he rose like
a salmon and put that beautiful header away.