"FOOTBALL," SAYS Germany's top scorer at these championships, Lukas Podolski, rather astutely, "is like chess without the dice," an observation that Joachim Loew would do well to reflect upon before deciding where to play the 23-year-old striker against Portugal tonight.

Loew's problems ahead of the game are many, but one of the few he can do anything about is his attack, where Mario Gomez has spectacularly failed to live up to the pre-tournament hype.

Miroslav Klose has made it clear he doesn't like his striking partner, and part-time philosopher Podolski has scored three of the team's four goals to date from the left side of midfield.

The German coach could hardly be happy with the way either of his front men has played but at least Klose has been making goals for his Bayern Munich team-mate.

When he tried to do the same for Gomez five minutes into the Austria game on Monday, the result was one of the most remarkable misses in the history of major finals. This from a man who had scored six times in 10 games for the Germans prior to the finals.

And the boys back at Bayern must be watching through gaps between their fingers. Klose was signed last summer for €15 million from Werder Bremen but has not had a great first season while most of Podolski's second season at the club - after a €10 million move from Cologne - has been spent on the bench. It has prompted the young striker to announce, amid claims Tottenham and Juventus are interested, he will decide on his future after these championships.

The reason Podolski can't get a game for his club is because Klose has been partnering the competition's outstandingly comical striker Luca Toni (30), who arrived from Italy last summer to become the world's second-best-paid footballer. His wages are €200,000 per week, second only to Kaka's.

Bayern club officials might be baffled by his performances for Italy, but after he helped them to a domestic treble last season with 24 goals in 31 league appearances and 39 in 46 overall, they're unlikely to be put out.

Podolski's sudden burst of form is an embarrassment, however, because the striker looks determined to leave, while Klose's antipathy towards Gomez - widely accepted to be the target of his "everybody in the camp is selfish" comment at a press conference last week - is believed to have been sparked in no small way by the fact Bayern have suggested they might sign him later in the summer, rather than in 2009 as had previously been expected.

The reports must have compounded his frustration at the end of a deeply disappointing year for the striker. A latecomer to the professional game who suffered many rejections before earning an amateur contract at Kaiserslautern and working his way into the first team, Klose has been Germany's top scorer in each of the last two World Cup finals.

After establishing himself as the Bundesliga's leading striker while at Werder Bremen, Klose must have expected to be the top dog at Bayern, where the obvious conclusion was he would partner his international team-mate Podolski.

The Polish-born pair come from bizarrely similar backgrounds - both were born in Silesia but moved while very young to Germany.

Toni's phenomenal success at Bayern, though, has left Klose, who started the campaign well but then found goals hard to come by, looking distinctly second best. The German's low point was probably in March against Schalke when Franck Ribery deliberately fired a shot from a very tight angle at his stomach so as to deflect it in. Klose was officially credited with the goal but everyone knew otherwise.

Gomez, meanwhile, had somehow emerged with his image enhanced back in November when he so badly missed an attempt to head home a Ludovic Magnin cross it went in off his genitals.

The striker was initially coy about the incident, suggesting the ball had hit him "somewhere between the thighs and the belly", but, when pressed, so to speak, revealed it had hit "the middle thing . . . it's big and it was hurting". In its headline the next day a German tabloid gleefully hailed the goal as the first scored in the Bundesliga with a penis.

He now looks set to be dropped, with Bastian Schweinsteiger likely to return to the left flank so that Podolski, if he's fit enough to play, can be shunted forward. If confirmed by Loew, the switch would probably be the best piece of news Klose has had all year.

For Loew it might still be regarded as something of a gamble given Gomez is the only one of the four to have come here off the back of a good club season.

Still, the German must know that in football, as in cards, you shuffle the deck and take your chances.