Fatih clings to slim hope

A familiar old-fashioned and very ominous sensation of German football's discipline, efficiency and power has started to blanket itself suffocatingly across the business end of Euro 2008. So much so, that you'll do well to find anyone outside Turkey who believes Fatih Terim's walking wounded, the purveyors of extraordinary late, late comebacks, have just one more miracle in them here tonight.

Arsene Wenger was here last night articulating what we've all long admired, even in spite of ourselves, about the German national team, as he said: "Their strength comes with a belief backed up by a massive, successful history. The quarter-finals showed all the teams are about the same level but the difference is that mental aspect. It's where Germany always scores."

We're talking a superiority complex which even 12 years without winning a major trophy - a veritable famine in teutonic terms - has done nothing to dent. And even with Turkey being carried on a wave of national fervour after three astonishing fightbacks, it takes a serious leap of the imagination to believe that outsiders bereft of eight key players can prevail. "Miracles just don't happen every game," as Wenger put it.

Only the 'M' word is evidently a dirty word for the canny "Emperor" Terim, who reckons another bright soul can back him up. "Albert Einstein once said there were two ways to live; one is to believe in miracles and live that way; the second is to know that nothing is a miracle. If a team doesn't give up and pushes to the end, that team will eventually win," he said.

"In our country we have many crises and people who are not tolerant. But when the topic is football it unites people. Everyone seems to have united under the Turkish flag. So if you're looking for a miracle, that's the miracle. Everyone for a few weeks has been able to forget their worries."

Certainly, Germany won't take lightly a team they are convinced are imbued with their own kind of steel, who fight to the end. But Joachim Low's Germany, as Wenger noted, had demonstrated against Portugal a "collective mental strength, a simplicity in passing and movement and an efficiency in the final third of the field", which now sets them apart.