Beiruting News

This match had been billed by most observers as the team of all the talents against the team of The Talent. They came to Salvador, the neutrals at least, to see Ronaldo: not just football's most recognisably burnished face but the sport's most brilliantly engineered quick-stepping athlete, an acme of speed, power and almost cartoonish amour propre. By half-time, however, the thrust of Portugal's and Germany's opening Group G fixture had instead been completely stolen by a player who at times barely looks like a footballer at all.

It was an afternoon dominated by Germany's shambling, angular, shaggy-haired forward Thomas Müller, who scored a hat-trick in a 4-0 win and produced a supremely intelligent display as a mobile central striker. What a delightfully unusual footballer Müller is, a player who continually pops up in menacing pockets of space, socks askew, arms waggling, resembling at times a pitch-invading dentist out for a jog who has somehow strayed in among all those sleekly groomed professional athletes.