Fatih clings to slim hope

Arsene Wenger was here last night articulating what we've all long admired, even in spite of ourselves, about the German national team, as he said: "Their strength comes with a belief backed up by a massive, successful history. The quarter-finals showed all the teams are about the same level but the difference is that mental aspect. It's where Germany always scores."

We're talking a superiority complex which even 12 years without winning a major trophy - a veritable famine in teutonic terms - has done nothing to dent. And even with Turkey being carried on a wave of national fervour after three astonishing fightbacks, it takes a serious leap of the imagination to believe that outsiders bereft of eight key players can prevail. "Miracles just don't happen every game," as Wenger put it.

Only the 'M' word is evidently a dirty word for the canny "Emperor" Terim, who reckons another bright soul can back him up. "Albert Einstein once said there were two ways to live; one is to believe in miracles and live that way; the second is to know that nothing is a miracle. If a team doesn't give up and pushes to the end, that team will eventually win," he said.

"In our country we have many crises and people who are not tolerant. But when the topic is football it unites people. Everyone seems to have united under the Turkish flag. So if you're looking for a miracle, that's the miracle. Everyone for a few weeks has been able to forget their worries."

Certainly, Germany won't take lightly a team they are convinced are imbued with their own kind of steel, who fight to the end. But Joachim Low's Germany, as Wenger noted, had demonstrated against Portugal a "collective mental strength, a simplicity in passing and movement and an efficiency in the final third of the field", which now sets them apart.

Yet there's more. Never mind the organisation, feel the ambition too. For this team also possess the 'X' factor which only a player of genuine but unpredictable brilliance can bring.

Bastian Schweinsteiger is young, gifted and peroxide, offering the sort of exotically talented alternative to traditional German solidity, and a nation always recognised that once the Bayern Munich wild card got his act together, he might take some stopping.

So perhaps all Germans may owe a vote of thanks to their Chancellor. For after a footballing life studded with youthful indiscretions, whether it be getting caught by a security guard skinny dipping with his girlfriend in the club whirlpool at midnight or breaking eve-of-game curfews in nightclubs, they all hope his dismissal against Croatia and subsequent rollicking from Angela Merkel really may have marked a turning point in his career. "She told me I shouldn't do the same foolish things any more," said Schweinsteiger, adamant that taking the Chancellor's telling-off to heart had helped inspire his man-of-the-match comeback against Portugal.

Presumably, one of those foolish things was sporting the legendary "toilet brush" hair-do which "Piggy" - he can never escape his unfortunate surname - sported at the World Cup. "I knew I was in good shape, I knew I had the trust of my team and I know what I am capable of doing," said Schweinsteiger, who had started the tournament on the bench but was freed to maraud on the right flank when the coach introduced his new 4-2-3-1 system against Portugal.

'Basti's' liberation, joyously expressed by his sliding finish for the goal of the tournament, quite galvanised Germany.

Not that a grown-up Schweinsteiger or anyone else worries Terim. Only the prediction that this 2008 version of Greece's 2004 fairytale is about to end here? Well, it doesn't take an Einstein . . .