It was that George Eliot moment.

As Croatia, football's new wave in the tea-towel kit, were sending home the German old guard, John Motson reached inside his BBC sheepskin for the dictionary of quotations. "Was it George Eliot who said the happiest countries are those with no history?" he asked, without expecting a return pass from football's Minister of Fence Sitting, Trevor Brooking.

Motty had surpassed himself in grasping for the grand over-statement. Far better was his next comment that "Germany are in all sorts of pain, physical and mental".

Now that was sweet music to all English souls, and more apt than any on-loan signing from literary sources.

Each World Cup has a pre-ordained wish list: the African nations must one day have a victorious rather than merely glorious tournament; Jimmy Hill will finally be pensioned off; the cameramen must find any excuse to pan in on the hip-swaying Brazilian samba girls; Scotland will find a new way to self-destruct; and Germany, jammy, haughty Germany, must be knocked out - any place, any time, any round will do.

This was happening to the maximum dream proportions - a dubious sending-off, Wimbledon long-ball tactics, Klinsmann as anonymous as in his second Tottenham sinecure, a sub borrowed from Harry Enfield's Scousers - and yet Motty remained stoically impartial. Cometh the hour for some Jonathan Pearce-The-Ear-Drum jingoism and hyperbole, and Motson sounded almost sad that the world stage would be losing the likes of Klinsmann and the sour Matthaus forever.

How Saturday missed the brand of island-nation delight that once had BBC rival Barry Davies shouting, in a hockey match, "Where was the German defence - and frankly who cares"?

If Motty really wanted to quote an Eliot, he should gone for T.S. Try this one, John: "Germany are consigned to The Waste Land".

Charles Hutchison

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