Germans seek salvation from Brazil

The second-best in the world? More like the third best in their Euro 2004 group. Good old Kahn.

Maybe once, his team-mates would have looked at their rock-steady inspiration and believed. Yet are they going to be convinced by a keeper who these days reaps his headlines for making howlers, running off with barmaids and generally seeming as if he's in some sort of mid- life crisis? If Jens Lehmann's evident disdain for him is anything to go by, they're not.

So, where can Germany find inspiration? Not from their defence, with Jens Nowotny looking desperately sluggish after two major knee injuries and Dortmund's Christian Worns getting found out by Hungary. A few weeks ago, Carsten Ramelow quit the national set-up because he was fed up of the constant media sniping.

From Michael Ballack? Not if he plays as he's done this year for Bayern Munich, where his best performances have been in the moaning stakes. The fans, Uli Hoeness, Karl-Heinz Rummenigge . . . they've all been against him, reckons Ballack.

So how about a boy from Rio called Kevin coming off the Copacabana to become the new hero? The tale of Stuttgart's Kevin Kuranyi has already been so unlikely that you couldn't dismiss it having a happy ending. Born in Brazil to a German father and a Panamanian mother, he really did learn his skills on the sand before emigrating to Stuttgart as a 15-year-old. In a side desperately short on creativity and crying out for the unexpected, Kuranyi's South American gifts do offer something different. "I've got German discipline and Brazilian technique," the 22-year-old forward trumpets. "I'm German now but deep in my heart I still feel Brazilian. You can't beat the sun and Copacabana." Certainly not in Stuttgart, he might have added.

It was Voller who blooded Kuranyi, Voller who has gambled with youth in teenagers like Sebastian Schweinsteiger and Lukas Podolski and Voller who personifies the fight still left in the German game. He has no time for what he sees as defeatism, being enraged when former international Felix Magath, now Stuttgart's coach, suggested it might be better if Germany didn't qualify for Portugal because the FA would be forced into long-overdue change.

Also mad at various pundits' analysis of Germany's goalless draw with Iceland last September, Voller dismissed it as a "load of crap". His bluntness has endeared him to football fans there who recognised what wonders he worked in Japan and Korea with such meagre resources and not all ex-players have sounded as negative as Magath.

After orchestrating his Hungarians' "wonder of Kaiserslautern", Matthaus comforted everyone at home: "Don't read too much into it, there's a lot of quality in the German team and I believe they will make the semifinals - at least."

You could call that wishful thinking but perhaps it would probably be more accurate to see it as the same sort of positive thinking which has always underpinned German footballing superiority.

This time next week, they will meet Holland, another team in disarray, in Porto and you'd have to ask which team you'd back to emerge best from their mess. Hmm.

See you in the quarter-finals, Rudi . . .