Sideline Cut: A week into this whistle-stop tour of Germany's pulsing football cities there is the blossoming sense that the host nation really want this World Cup to be remembered as wunderschön and vollkommen, beautiful and complete. Certainly, those are the two adjectives most of the (depressingly) multilingual and (unfailingly) pleasant volunteers have chosen when asked to describe their aspirations for this World Cup in their native tongue.

You would spend a long time journeying through the Ruhr or the Black Forest or Berlin before you would come across a German in a bad mood during this World Cup. For such a big and powerful country, everyone from barmen to Herr Beckenbauer has been touchingly eager for reassurance that things are AOK.

As one attentive barman enquired four times within 15 minutes, "It is good? It is delicious for you?"

And it was - but how good can a Coca-Cola and cheese sandwich be?

After a night game in Hanover, thousands of Italian and Ghanaian fans walked back to the city centre along the gleaming and placid Maschee Lake. Among them was a local volunteer called David, an observant and unflappable sort of kid who was clearly bright as a button.

Asked about life in Hanover, David gave a troubled sigh and admitted that Germans considered his home city to be the most boring in the land. "They say it has two good things," he smiled resignedly, "The road to Cologne and the road to Berlin."

He shrugged with the stoicism of a schoolchild that has learned to ignore the taunts from the bullies: "It's not so bad here. We have nice gardens. It's okay."

Not that he is the kind to be pushed around. After this World Cup, he leaves for Bremen to become a commissioner in the German police, a coveted post that attracted 4,000 applicants for just 25 vacancies.

Lucrative and important though his career will be, he reckoned it will mean a lifetime away from the horticultural delights of Hanover and was resigned to being stuck in Bremen: "I have to go," he explained with that unarguable Germanic logic.

Feeling for his plight, I explained that in the Irish force, when guards are locked into a similar geographical conundrum, they prevail upon their seniors to pull what is technically known as "an auld stroke".

David was intrigued at the mechanics of Irish stroke-pulling, and after further investigations, he concluded glumly that he could not seeing it becoming apart of German bureaucracy.

Like most Germans, he communicated in English and made you want to at least attempt to return the gesture. Unfortunately, like most Irish schoolboys of the late 1980s, this column chose French over German, probably on the fundamentally sound principle that Vanessa Paradis was topping the charts with Joe Le Taxi at the time.

Not that language stands in the way of people at the World Cup. Sometime after midnight on Wednesday, with thunder-and-lightning storms flashing over Dortmund and Germans literally singing in the rain after their last-minute victory over Poland, a Peruvian - recently employed by the Canadian soccer association as a technical adviser - described his tournament so far.

His brief was to see as many teams as possible to pick up ideas on training and tactics. At the opening game between Germany and Costa Rica he found himself seated, to his utter awe and disbelief, beside Arsene Wenger. He said the Arsenal manager, of whom he had long been an admirer, was one of the friendliest football men he had ever encountered.

They spent the game talking about coaching, and Wenger told the Peruvian that whatever ambitions he had in the game, he should go straight for them, should have no regrets. Over the 90 minutes, however, neither man could help being aware that the German supermodel Claudia Schiffer was seated directly in front of them. And so at one point Wenger, with that mischievous Gallic expression he usually reserves for questions about Thierry Henry, leaned towards his companion and said, "Sometimes at football games it is hard not to get distracted."

Right now, though, the Germans only have eyes for Michael Ballack. Sport has a habit of producing people who seem predestined for all kinds of rare and historic success. And like Bobby Moore or Franz Beckenbauer before him, the Bayern man radiates the sense of being chosen for greatness.

Germany came into this tournament labouring under the tag of being Ballack and 10 others. Slowly but surely, though, the dramatic nature of Jürgen Klinsmann's team has gladdened the national mood, and the gripping finale against brave, luckless Poland, which ended with the winning goal from journeyman substitute Oliver Neuville (one Dortmund teenager on the train later toasted him as "the worst German player ever") with one of those totemic strikes that can elevate a team above its natural abilities.

Although the hosts lack the kind of celebrated team sheet Brazil, Italy, Argentina or the Netherlands can call upon, a roll of victories and the thunderous energy of the home supporters could yet make Ballack the man of this tournament. Certainly, all around Dortmund's rail station on Wednesday night the local mood was one of happiness, a boozy conviction that Deutschland would go all the way.

They sat waiting for the late trains back to wherever, swigging beer to their hearts' content - you can buy a chilled Pilsner for two euro in German train stations long after midnight - and singing Germany's glory. And who could deny them? Of course, other heroes will unveil themselves this week.

The man of the tournament so far in my eyes, however, has to be David Miller, the veteran football man from the Telegraph. He is one of those unfailingly polite and exceptionally nice Englishmen that make you feel immediately guilty for any churlish or ungenerous thoughts you might ever have held about Blighty - not that one ever would. While hundreds of media folk arrived at the stadium labouring under several tons of technology, the Telegraph man came bearing a pencil, a sheet of paper and a telephone.

At the midway point of the second half, he phoned London and proceeded to draft, in a voice that would have made John Gielgud weep with envy, a brilliant and flowing account of what was happening as it happened. His words sped off to London the old-fashioned way and were beaten into a hard drive by the copy taker on the other end. His report finished at the final whistle.

It is a dying art. Peter Byrne of this newspaper excelled at it but nobody in this house has inherited the skill. And listening to Miller was actually better than watching the game, which took place several thousand feet below us. It was delicious for me.

He signed out with a formal "And this is the Telegraph saying good night from Germany" and for a fleeting moment, he managed to make the whole nonsensical media carnival seem romantic and even heroic again.

"This," he explained later, waving his hands at the hundreds of heads burrowed into pale-blue laptop screens and others screaming into mobile phones, "is all rather a distraction to me."

It would have been nice had I been able to buy him a beer, but he announced he was driving straight to Berlin. And I had no fears for him, thinking of him out there on the heartless, gleaming night-time autobahn. Even though he was undoubtedly driving a hire car, it was preferable to imagine him pottering along in an old Daimler, or something sturdy from Rover, with the BBC World Service for company, or perhaps a cassette tape featuring Wagner.

He was, in the words of that old French song, a very cool cat.