Tryin’ to get to heaven before they close the door

AFTER England v Portugal in Gelsenkirchen on Saturday, our delayed late-night rail connection via Essen back to base camp in Heidelberg was doing a passable impression of the Marie Celeste until we pulled into Frankfurt station at about 3.20am.

The city on the Main had been the venue for the evening game between Brazil and France, and all of sudden it was like morning rush hour in middle of the night, as the library-like stillness and silence of Wagon 24 was uproariously disrupted by the entrance of a veritable football league of nations: delirious French, devastated Brazilians, boisterous Germans along for the ride, and even a handful of red-shirted England fans who, rather like their team in this tournament, seemed to have comprehensively lost their way.

This World Cup, like the train itself, had reached another major turning point — and the faces full of joy or despair told their own tale.

First, poor old Eng-er-land. Honestly, could the World Cup’s most lurid soap storyline have ended any other way than with the loss of their captain, the loss of their star man, the loss of their manager and the loss, yet again, of a crucial game on penalties?

Next thing, we’ll hear that the missing boy Theo Walcott has been found buried under a patio.

Played on his own up-front, Wayne Rooney’s impact was always bound to be unorthodox, either that of a superhero or all too humanly frail. Before the tournament, we’d asked if Rooney’s foot could stand up to a defender’s tackle; the key question on Saturday was if a defender’s tackle could stand up to Rooney’s foot.

After four grim performances, there can be only limited consolation in the fact that England reserved their most positive and admirably spirited football of the whole tournament for the 60 minutes during which they were reduced to 10 men and, with David Beckham’s injury, were obliged to turn to a proper winger — Aaron Lennon — to provide some electrifying pace and penetration.

Next, Sven Goran Erikkson sent for the Tall Man but had he opted to keep the always lively Joe Cole on the pitch, his team might have seen off a disappointing Portuguese side before succumbing to the real English disease — a pre-traumatic stress disorder which means that when three lions are put on the spot, they turn into lambs.

And so the supposed ‘Golden Generation’ of English football have packed their Wags and said goodbye to the circus. They will be missed, but for hardly any of the right reasons.

Not that there was much pleasure to be taken from Portugal’s laboured efforts to win the game in normal time.

Hopes for a more productive effort in the semi-final rest heavily on the returning Deco’s ability to supply the ammunition, but after the turn of events in Saturday’s other quarter-final, the odds are that Portugal will soon be trailing England out of Germany.

“Turn of events”, of course, is a rather delicate euphemism for the quite stunning transformation in the fortunes of French football. In the space of a week, their team has gone from over the hill to over the moon, forcing all of us who dismissed them out of hand to eat humble esgargots.

But we won’t choke on them.

Interviewing George Best once, I could only concur when the great man said that whenever Brazil went out of a World Cup, a bit of his own soul went with them. But this time it’s different, if only because a Brazilian side which failed to live up to billing has been eliminated by a French side completely surpassing theirs.

This was meant to be Ronaldinho’s tournament; instead, it’s turning into a remarkable swansong for Zinedine Zidane. His masterclass in Frankfurt on Saturday night was only part of the reason for France’s success but, taken as a whole, their renaissance is shaping up to be the great romantic story of this World Cup.

France may have charmed the millions watching on television, but for those of us on the ground here in Germany, it’s the potent emotional clout of the hosts’ progress to the semi-finals which is helping to turn a World Cup of mixed footballing quality into an unforgettable experience.

For that reason, alone, there will be no complaints from this quarter if Germany do manage to overcome Italy in Dortmund tomorrow night.

The argument that Argentina’s superiority in the quarter-final was fatally undermined by the transformation of Pekerman into Tinkerman is undeniable up to a point — the point at which he chose to leave Lionel Messi on the bench, to be exact — but it overlooks the fact that, for all the finer qualities of their football, the Argentinians troubled Jens Lehmann even less from play than they did in the penalty shoot-out.

Germany’s likely problem against Italy is that with the magnificent Fabio Cannavaro marshalling the defence, Miroslav Klose will be as surprised as anyone if he is afforded anything like the kind of penalty box latitude he was given to score against Argentina. And with Luca Toni having finally located his shooting boots against Ukraine, Italy are finally beginning to look like an equally formidable threat.

If we have learned any lesson from this tournament, it should be that whatever you predict, predict nothing.

And so once again, we’re back on the rails, on the last few legs of the journey, bound for Dortmund, Munich and Berlin. As the tournament rapidly approaches its final destination, Bob Dylan could have been speaking for World Cup 2006 when he sang:

“This train don’t pull no gamblers, no midnight ramblers like it did before.

I’ve been all around the world boys, now I’m tryin’ to get to heaven before they close the door.”