It will be a minor consolation to Robbie Keane that he alone has breached the German fortress, a goal scored in injury time. An analysis of Germany's run to the final in Yokohama today cannot shirk the obvious conclusions. Saudi Arabia, Cameroon, Paraguay, USA and South Korea is hardly a parade of footballing colossi, but nor is it Germany's fault that Italy, Spain and Portugal, the big-hitters in the top half of the draw, failed. Not for the first time, the Germans have profited from the shortcomings of others, both on and off the field. Some cute lobbying must have been required to persuade the South Koreans to sanction a Swiss referee for the semi-final, but the whiff of scandal surrounding victories over Italy and Spain gave the co-hosts little room to manoeuvre. One-nil to the Germans before kick-off and at the final whistle. Yet nothing should detract from the miracle worked by Rudi V?r since the night a bedraggled and demoralised German side slipped away from the Olympic stadium in Munich.

Ten months on, the vanquished are in the final of the World Cup and the 5-1 victors have gone home. For V?r, whose own misery that night was compounded by news of an illness to his father, the revival has been a personal triumph, handsome confirmation of his exalted status in the eyes of the German public and a salutary reminder to the more virulent sections of the English press of the powerful forces of consistency. V?r's offer of resignation to the German Football Federation the day after England's victory was firmly rejected. Neither German press nor the people turned on the coach, focusing their anger on the players instead. V?r's reputation as a player, unlike that of Kevin Keegan in similar circumstances, stayed intact, which gave him the confidence to rally the players back to the cause."V?r hasn't changed enormously after the 5-1," says one German football writer. "Even after that night, he was still Rudi, the guy you could have a beer with, the polite, nice guy that the German public know and admire He coaches by instinct and by his feeling for the game.

There's virtually no difference between V?r the player and V?r the coach. He never blames his team in public, he doesn't give big speeches to the team, he won't batter you with words. In press conferences, his second sentence is always: 'Oh, what can I tell you today?' But he does everything the way the players like it and they respond to that."V?r's first task last September, echoing the words of Sven Goran Eriksson in victory, was to grasp the wider picture. Victory meant nothing if England failed to beat Albania and Greece; Germany were not out of the World Cup, merely pitched into the choppy waters of a play-off, an ignominy in itself for a nation which had never failed to qualify for the World Cup, but not terminal. V?r staked his reputation on qualifying and, in a two-leg tie against the Ukraine, his players were forced to confront the real consequences of their defeat in Munich "Forget 5-1 Just imagine not qualifying for the World Cup Germany?" as one German journalist put it.

"Trembling, trembling, trembling, that was the really tense time There was so much fear. But the team came through and V?r has used this feeling to his advantage time and again. Nothing could be worse than when we faced the Ukrainians."V?r admits that reliving the experience of the play-off has proved an unbreakable psychological crutch through this long tournament. "The pressure we had to bear then was enormous and the fact that we coped with it brought the players closer together," he says "It made us much stronger. I always try to keep everything under control, but when people are criticising your team, it's hard.