The only thing surer than a German winner of this Saturday’s Champions League Final is a blitz of bad tabloid puns on the run-up to it: lots of ‘Hun-derful’ headlines and ‘Ve-hav-vays-of-making-you-vin-at-Vembley’ bubbles sticking out of pointy Kaiser helmets.
An all-German final in Vest, sorry, West London, is tabloid gold. There’ll probably be some 1966 references to go with the 1940 ones too, pictures of Nobby and Bobby, and bolshy queries as to who won the blaaaady war anyway.
And this is just what drives tabloid hacks ape: broadsheet hacks using the same gimmicky language as them but in a supposedly pious condemnatory way; it’s called having it both ways. So ‘hande-hoch’ to dealing in stereotypical cartoons.
The problem is no one’s immune to them. Even the rightest of the right-on realise caricatures burrow in like jingoistic ticks. Like Yanks from the south are all God-fearin’, cross-burning rednecks, or the Japanese are all inscrutable and repressed, or Cork men are all prodigiously endowed.
And what Germans are is efficient. They’re always efficient. And organised. And you can never write them off, George. It’s tempting here to query the efficiency of a nation that managed to start two World Wars and lose both of them, but that’s to indulge maybe a little too much in a goose-steppy stereotype that continues to thrive but which hardly does any of us credit.
It will be interesting though to see the projected television audience figures around Europe for a Champions League final that in cartoon-terms should be a feast of efficiency, especially since so many prejudices about Germans have been concrete-reinforced by an EU austerity policy which, fair or not, is seen as German efficiency gone uber-board.
Cartoon stereotypes
And that's a pity, because if ever you need confirmation that cartoon stereotypes are crude, then watching Bayern Munich and Borussia Dortmund in action provides it.
Definitions of good, exciting football always travel through the prism of the beholder.
Barcelona's tiki-taka for instance thrills many purists but there has always been the persistent suspicion that all the pretty patterns in the world can sometimes seem a mite self-indulgent, a suspicion hardly backed-up by the stuffing of the Nou Camp trophy cabinet, but one that still exists anyway.
There is also the reality that winning football is always attractive to someone. Arsenal supporters thrilled to the soporific methods of George Graham’s Gunners for years despite ample evidence that carving initials in your eyeballs could be less optically painful.
But by any criteria, Dortmund and Munich are capable of securing attention from even the most neutral of observers through the sheer exuberance of their play. Both sides operate with a brio that leaves the rest of Europe peering enviously up at them.
Borussia and Bayern play football with a fizzing style that might be characterised as champagne were it not for the sturdy lager-barrel foundations on which the whole thing is based, the sturdiest of all possibly being the rather old-fashioned football principle that the paying customer is entitled to be entertained.
Watching Chelsea rumble to Europa success, it was hard to reconcile such tedium with Roman Abramovich's notorious dismissal of Jose Mourinho for not playing sexy football.
Benitez’s habit of treating outstanding players as pawns in a tactical chess-game is notably un-sexy but Abramovich’s parameters have clearly changed, and since Roman’s parameters are the only ones that matter at Chelsea, falling over the line will seemingly do just fine.
The German Model of football has been praised for some time now in terms of focussing long-term on the generation of home-talent and maintaining a tight grip on debt rather than financing short-term splurges on the back of television revenue and the fluctuating gastric impulses of bored Russian billionaires.
Young players
This Wembley final is a tangible representation of a decade's worth of foresight and responsibility.
The outcome is a crop of outstanding young players, encouraged by an attacking coaching philosophy, personified by the Borussia manager, Jurgen Klopp.
But it is fascinating too to ponder the influence of the terraces in all this, and the importance of the venerable German tradition of fans maintaining a controlling interest in the vast majority of clubs.
The ‘fifty per cent, plus one’ principle has come under threat in Germany from short-sighted owners keen to bring in the sort of billionaire owners that have sent turnover, but also debt, spiralling elsewhere in Europe, and particularly in the English Premier League.
What’s amazing is that such moves have been shot down, and by big boys like Bayern too, who, remarkably, continue to favour treating fans as customers rather than cash-cows and place a value in maintaining a sense of ownership among the communities in which the clubs are based
In individual terms, such ownership isn’t going to allow any fan inform Klopp on team selection.
But try telling Dortmund's "Yellow Wall" they don't have a stake in encouraging the manager to keep the reins loose on Gotze, Reuss & Co, for the very simple reason that it's both effective, and thrilling to watch.
Is it coincidence that it is Barcelona, another club where fans have a meaningful input, who also favour flair and style?
Maybe it’s a fancifully communal and old-fashioned view of the game but it’s a holistic illusion this Champions League final can maintain for a while.
And for that we should be grateful to the Germans – the great entertainers. Who’d have thought?
