Germany, it’s Argentina calling

HEIDELBERG may be the romantic soul of Germany but, until Saturday, nobody could have confused it with the beating heart of this World Cup.

Base camp for the Irish Examiner’s second round campaign, the historic town on the banks of the Neckar fills up with tourists in high summer and plays host to university students the rest of the year, but Berlin or Munich or Hamburg it is not.

At 5pm, local time, on Saturday, a kind of hush descended on Heildelberg; 90 minutes later the place was doing a fair impersonation of being the centre of the World Cup, if not the world itself.