Quarter-Finals: While the medical people were wheeled in yesterday to provide reassurance to the nation that Germany's leading stars will be fighting fit come kick-off time against Argentina on Friday, the pre-match war of words got under way between those players sufficiently fit now to attend press conferences.

Doubts about the fitness of Michael Ballack and Miroslav Klose were fuelled yesterday morning by the pair's failure to train with the rest of the squad. Ballack has been central to the side's progress to date while Klose has already contributed four goals.

Team officials, though, insisted the pair will be fit to start on Friday and had simply been ordered to do fitness work in private as they recover from minor strains picked up at the weekend.

The news will be welcomed by a nation now merrily getting carried away with their side's continuing World Cup adventure. Prior to the start of the tournament expectations for Jürgen Klinsmann's team were remarkably low among the German public, who had grown used to poor results and mediocre performances in friendly games played over the past two years.

Now, however, an opinion pole shows 87 per cent of the Germans believe that their side will beat Argentina on Friday while more than half (53 per cent) reckon they will go on to lift the trophy on July 9th.

Carlos Tevez, the gifted Argentinian striker begs to disagree. "Germany are going to have to show more than they have done so far to beat us," he observed at the press conference that followed his side's own training session yesterday morning. "They know that if they let us play, we can cause them problems," he added.

Asked what his own side needed to do in order to win the game, the 22-year-old's recipe for success was simple. "We must show balls," he said. "It's going to be a very tough match but cerebral too."

He insisted the hostile crowd would not inhibit players whose experience of league football back home has prepared them for worse than anything German supporters could throw at them, and he dismissed as insignificant the physical strength of a German side that simply overwhelmed their Swedish opponents in Munich.

"I'm not afraid of them if they come at me," said the Corinthians player, who has come on from the bench in three of Argentina's four games to date and scored once in the rout of Serbia and Montenegro. "I'd be afraid of them in a fight . . . but I'm not afraid because we're going to play football."

The Germans, meanwhile, see the threat posed by their quarter-final opponents as coming from the inventiveness of Juan Roman Riquelme and the pace of players like Tevez and Lionel Messi, both of whom are likely to start the game on the bench.

"We know that facing these players will be difficult," remarked Hanover defender Per Mertesacker but, he insisted, "we are not quaking in our boots."

"Players like Javier Saviola can always turn you around but the whole team will stand together, just as we did in the last match against Sweden. We can pick up where we left off there."

"All the blather about our supposedly weak defence has stopped," said defensive midfielder Torsten Frings. "We're playing a compact game and we've only conceded two goals in four games." His side's recent encounters with the South Americans suggest there is cause for confidence as well, he insists. "Both times we were almost able to prove we were the better team," says the 29-year-old of the two 2-2 draws the sides have played out over the last 18 months. "And we're capable of beating them now, of at last getting a victory over one of the giants."