Today's other European Championship stories in brief

Lothar gets his calls mixed up

ANOTHER FORMER German skipper has prompted an apology from Yahoo and Eurosport, who have been using Lothar Matthäus as their star pundit for the tournament.

Sadly, Lothar's predictions have not been going so well, just nine of 28 games turning out the way he reckoned they would in terms of whether a particular team would win or the game would, at the end of 90 minutes, be drawn.

Those odds are almost precisely what you would expect were a pin being used and on their website yesterday the Early Doors section said it would "now like to clarify that Matthäus is singularly lacking in insight and that we would have been better off getting our predictions from Lindsay Lohan".

Arshavin wants Spanish call

IT WAS nice to see that the player of the tournament so far, Russia's Andrei Arshavin, had to issue not so much a "come and get me" plea as a wake-up call to the leading Spanish clubs following his startling display against the Netherlands.

"I know I've had offers from England and Germany," he said. "But what I would really like is to play in Spain, in the Primera Liga. It's the championship I've always followed and I like the football they play there. But at the moment," he concluded, "I haven't any offers from Spain."

By the time you read this, that may just have changed.

Pele the consummate professional

NEWS THAT Pele was robbed of a gold necklace, phone and watch by youths while travelling toward his home in the Brazilian city of Santos arrives a couple of days after a discussion over dinner the other night in which the Zurich-based Irish reporters recalled various encounters with him.

Comfortably the best yarn thrown up belonged to Paul Lennon of the Star, who was at the Irish end of a conference call with the Brazilian a couple of years ago when Viagra was the product being plugged. The deal was that each reporter was allowed ask two questions and Paul's were the usual kind: best moment, best game, etc.

Pele, however, was in consummate professional mode.

"Paul," came his gently-uttered and heavily accented reply to question number two down the line, "you haven't asked me about erectile dysfunction."

Germans score in quotes section 

GERMAN MAGAZINE Der Spiegelhas its very own answer to our very own Mary Hannigan and has compiled a fine selection of German football quotes, which is carried in the English-language section of the magazine's website.

Not surprisingly, the great

Franz Beckenbauer features prominently with such killer observations as "One can win each game, one can lose each game," and "There is only one possibility: victory, defeat or a draw."

The former German midfielder Andreas Möller proved his country's footballers have as weak a grasp of global geography as those from across the water. Asked some years back where he would be playing the following season, he replied: "Milan or Madrid - the most important thing is it's Italy."

And the former Vfb Stuttgart star Thorsten Leget suggested a certain shakiness on the numbers front. Asked about a forthcoming game, he observed, "Our chances are 70:50."