Germany play badly, look awful, but they've gone a long way

GERMAN REACTIONHAVING SEIZED upon the defeat of Portugal last week as evidence they had the team and tactical know-how to go all the way in this tournament, the Germans find themselves in familiar territory since Wednesday's win over Turkey, with leading players citing the manner of their latest victory as evidence they have the luck required to be champions too.

Philipp Lahm's late goal against the Turks in Basle gave the three-times champions a win not even they could bring themselves to claim afterwards had been deserved.

The Bayern Munich left back also admitted to having been a little surprised by his man-of-the-match award but collectively Joachim Loew and his players have been determined to interpret the good fortune they enjoyed as yet another confidence boost ahead of Sunday's final in Vienna.

"It was our worst game in this tournament, but," reasoned Per Mertesacker, "if you play that bad and still win then you are able to do great things."

The Werder Bremen centre back was just one of many German players to perform poorly on the night, though, and Loew acknowledged his side's game plan had gone out the window in the face of determined Turkish pressure. "Instead of playing the passing game through the centre that has made us strong, we started hitting the ball long and the Turks were able to deal with that," he said.

The results, he admitted, were all too predictable. "We weren't very good in the first half and in the second half we weren't very good either."

The German coach, the country's first in almost three decades to get his side to a major championship final at the first attempt, said his side were "trembling at the end" of a frantic but fiercely exciting contest. But he paid tribute to the character his side had shown after conceding a late equaliser to bounce straight back with Lahm's even later winner.

There is, nevertheless, a widespread recognition that the Germans completely failed to prevent the Turks playing their game and Loew must now decide if changes are required to his starting line-up ahead of Sunday's title decider.

Having deputised so well for the injured Torsten Frings against Portugal, Simon Rolfes was far less effective against Turkey and was ultimately replaced after hurting himself in a first-half clash of heads.

The introduction of Frings sparked a brief improvement in his side's fortunes but the midfielder, who fractured a rib in the final group match against Austria, didn't make the sort of sustained impact Loew must have been hoping for.

Despite that the 31-year-old seems likely to start in Vienna with Loew unlikely to meddle too much with what, for all their problems on Wednesday, has still been a strong enough combination to earn a place in the final while stars of the group stages like the Netherlands, Croatia and Portugal have all gone home.

Back at their base in Tenero, southern Switzerland, yesterday Loew's players showed no sign whatsoever that their confidence had been in any way dented by the pattern of the previous night's game with several seen relaxing in the area around their hotel before a scheduled training session last night.

Clearly, though, they will need to be much better on Sunday for while they threatened to find some sort of rhythm on a couple of occasions in Basle, they spent most of the night involved in a rather desperate rearguard action with the Turks passing up the chance to put them out of the competition.

Lahm's role in setting up Miroslav Klose's second-half goal as well as his own strike late on, earned him the man-of-the-match award but the 24-year-old readily acknowledged he had had his fair share of problems at the other end of the pitch.

"As a player, you always try to impose yourself whether it's for 90 minutes or 120 minutes," he said. "I appreciate I didn't do well with their equaliser, I had my low points. During the tournament I had games where I would have deserved man of the match more."

But Lukas Podolski's assertion that the manner of the win is a secondary consideration reflected a widely-held view by players whose collective displays have been rather erratic over the course of the five games they have played at these finals. "It doesn't matter how bad or good we were," he said. "The thing that matters is that we are in the final."

Colin Kazim-Richards, meanwhile, insists the Turks will benefit from the experience they have gained over the past few weeks and come back stronger for the World Cup qualifiers.

"We thought at the start we could get to the semi-finals. We thought we could have gone on and won the tournament. Everyone has said we played better than Germany," he said. "But in the team meeting afterwards we got over it pretty quickly. We weren't totally over it, but immediately we started talking about taking that same spirit to the World Cup," he added.

"We will have round about the same team, the same players. We have the experience of being in the semi-final of a European Championship and now we can take it into the World Cup. You never know."