World Cup journos: never afraid to mention the war

It is 65 years since Hitler shot himself in the Berlin bunker and World War Two came to an end eight days later. Yet, to the puzzlement of younger football fans, Fleet Street's headline writers, and some of its World Cup correspondents, cannot put it out of their minds.

Sunday's match between England and Germany is not just about the two teams' bitter history on the football pitch, it's about war.

Even the esteemed Times sports writer Simon Barnes admits there's no escaping it. "I have to mention the war," he wrote today. "There is no point in denying that the convoluted history of football between these nations is profoundly affected by the history of - well, history. You know, war and all that other stuff you get at the opposite end of the newspaper."

This was at least more subtly put than Piers Morgan managed in 1996. On the eve of the semi-final between England and Germany in Euro 96, Morgan, then editor of the Daily Mirror, splashed across the front page: 'Achtung! Surrender - For you, Fritz, ze Euro 96 Championship is over'.

Not only was Morgan proved wrong - England lost in the subsequent penalty shootout - but he was forced to apologise to readers for the over-the-top front page.

Because of that cautionary tale, today's headline writers have been relatively restrained ahead of Sunday's do-or-die (oops!) game. However, some bizarre allusions have still crept in.

For the sake of young British and German football fans for whom World War Two is a very long time ago, and World War One ancient history, here is an explanation:

'BECKENBAUER, MINISTER OF PROPAGANDA'Courtesy of James Lawton in the Independent, who was writing up the former German captain Franz Beckenbauer's criticism of  England. Beckenbauer suggested the England's players were "burnt out" and called them "stupid" for not scoring enough goals to win Group C. Lawton managed to raise the spectre of Hitler's infamous propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels. The notorious anti-Semite, credited with organising the first attacks on German Jews that led to the Holocaust, committed suicide on May 1, 1945, the day after after Hitler killed himself.

'DAS BOOT IS ON THE OTHER FOOT'Courtesy of the Sun's headline writers, who put this on a story suggesting England's stars have the chance to overturn the German's long-running superiority on the football pitch, because "new research" shows our boys are better than theirs from the penalty spot. Das Boot (German for 'the boat' - not the boot, of course) was the title of a film and TV series which followed the exploits of a WW2 German submarine crew.

'GERM WARFARE'Courtesy of the Sun again, this time a caption to a photo of German midfielder Mesut Ozil scoring in the 1-0 defeat of Ghana. Germany famously pursued a biological warfare programme during World War One - which came to an end 92 years ago.

'BRING ON THE HUNS'Courtesy of the Daily Sport and Daily Star. The use of the degoratory term 'Hun' for Germans was popular during World War One. It is thought to date back to a speech by Kaiser Wilhelm II during the Boxer rebellion in China in 1900. Ordering German troops to be ruthless towards the rebels, the Kaiser said: "Just as a thousand years ago, the Huns under Attila won a reputation of might that lives on in legends, so may the name of Germany in China, such that no Chinese will even again dare so much as to look in askance at a German."

In World War Two, Churchill popularised the term again. Referring to the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, the wartime prime minister described "the dull, drilled, docile brutish masses of the Hun soldiery, plodding on like a swarm of crawling locusts". ·