Now it's official: on Friday 22 June, they will face each other in the quarter-finals of the European Championships Germany and Greece. The derby of the spread, as someone has already defined it. The first against the last, the "German locomotive", the "flywheel of the European economy" against the ballast, the small big country submerged in debt that weighs on the markets and on the union. Two members of a single extended family, and a little torn, who just can't stand each other because they are too different and distant.
The same argument seems to apply to the two teams. Germany, with its 25,7 years of average age, is the youngest team in the history of the competition, a lethal concentration of physical strength and temperament, a steamroller who it has also learned to accommodate imagination in its machinery, embodied above all by the half-Turkish Ozil, like that variation of rhythm necessary not to send its wheels out of time.
La Greece, on the other hand, is an old and mangy team, perfectly symbolized by the shrew Gekas, a center forward of mournful ugliness and dubious effectiveness, who built his mixed fortunes right in Germany. It was Karagounis who dragged it to the quarterfinals, one of the three veterans of the 2004 feat, when Greece, led by a German (the catenacciaro Rehagel), shocked the world of football by triumphing at the European Championships.
Karagounis, who is 35 today, seemed like a finished player (or perhaps never really started) even then, when, at Inter, he warmed up more benches than hearts.
It was 8 years ago, but it seems like a lifetime, even if Karagounis is still the same. On the front page of the Greek newspaper Goal-news, the day after the victory against Russia, he stood out, the hero, exultant with angry joy. Further down the title, in large letters: "Now bring us Merkel".
Greece coach Fernando Santos, a Portuguese, has already taken steps to raise the tone of the challenge, responding, with suspicious patriotism, to those who asked him if the victory was a response to Merkel's policies, which it was “the history of Greece that inspired him. Science and democracy were born here and for this reason no one can give us lessons".
It is not the first time that political issues are hidden behind sport. It happened in '72, when the Olympic basketball final between the USA and the USSR became just a chapter in a much longer story, one of the infinite fields where the Cold War was fought, the fight between the two giants for the possession of the soul of the rest of the world.
Or in '86, when Maradona, within 5 minutes full of football history, scored the most infamous and then the most beautiful goal for the English, avenging the Falkland-Malvinas war. "Whoever steals from a thief has a hundred years of forgiveness" he said then, with that biblical populism that has always come naturally to him like a strike with his left foot, to justify his goal with his hand, that hand of God that punished the English "usurper"..
It seems unlikely, this time, that the desire for revenge of a wounded people could be enough, very Christianly speaking, to make the last first. Football, you know, is not the kingdom of heaven. The Argentines, in addition to pride and revanchism, had Maradona, the Greeks no longer even have Karagounis, who was booked for a non-existent simulation and will not play.
All this while elections are taking place in the country and yes celebrates the victory of the conservative, and pro-European, Samaras (only homonym of the handsome striker diverted, even in his meter and 92, on the left wing, to make way for the shrew Gekas), and of those parties that for fifteen years have falsified state budgets, dragging him into the abyss where he wriggles today. Reminding us for the umpteenth time that everything needs to change, for everything to stay the same, to push this long night further.
