There are so many issues surrounding Tuesday’s semi-final that it’s hard to figure out the football amid all this. Traditional nationalist enmity, subterfuge, charges of underhand behaviour, racist slurs, match-fixing; if the match is half as compelling as the backdrop, we’re in for a treat.

The immediate flashpoint is, of course, the suspension of Torsten Frings, Germany’s lynchpin defensive midfielder, for his role in the fracas immediately after the quarter-final win over Argentina on Saturday. Frings was “outed” by TV channel Sky Italia, which had been tipped off by an Italian print reporter, and which in turn passed on the tapes to FIFA.

That has led to an outcry in Germany, and there are fears that it may spill over in the streets — though hopefully not the pitch — tomorrow. The tension had been building up since German magazine Der Spiegel, in an editorial last Wednesday, described Italians as “parasites, slimy and mamma’s boys”.

The retort to that came from the typically feisty midfielder Gennaro Gattuso, who — in an own goal of sorts — suggested that Germans were irked by their wives habitually straying to Italian men.

Amid all this, there is a football match to be played tomorrow at Germany’s Fortress Dortmund, where the home side has not been beaten in 14 matches since the 1930s, scoring 59 goals against seven conceded. That record could be under threat given Frings’s suspension; the midfielder, who marked Riquelme out of the last match, had been assigned a similar task tomorrow with Italy’s playmaker Francesco Totti. That task will probably fall to the less accomplished Sebastian Kehl.

... contd.