Quintin Jardine's blog

One of the things I love about football is its infinite capacity for creating situations that are at best ironic and at worst potentially doom-laden. For example, has there ever been a better moment, in the current century at least, for  Germany and Greece to be drawn to face each other? This has the potential to be the game of the tournament; not one for the purists, but for those among us who are old enough to  remember what a good kicking match was really like, before the anonymous sissies in committee rooms in Switzerland tried to turn it into a non-contact sport. I am looking forward to it like no other, in the expectation that the Greeks will play to their strengths, of which they have only one, strength itself, and the Germans will play to theirs, i. e. reacting theatrically to the slightest touch and feigning life-threatening injury. ‘Mrs Merkel, your boys could be in for a hell of a doing!‘

One of the things I do not love about football is its governance. We’ve all heard abut Sepp Blatter, but he’s not the only lunatic running the asylum. His potential successor is right there with him. The latest piece of cynicism perpetrated by Michel Platini’s UEFA, who really could not come close to running a raffle, has been highlighted by two of the game’s most respected black players, Rio Ferdinand and Vincent Kompany. For their fans’ racist abuse of the Italian Balotelli, the Croatian FA has been fined €80,000. For displaying the name of a bookmaker on his underwear, the Danish player Bendtner has been fined €100,000 and banned for one game. The message: UEFA is more concerned about commercial issues than about racism. It will be interesting to see what penalties lie in wait for Ferdinand and Kompany for pointing this out and protesting against it.