Azzurri take hosts' living room by storm

Sometimes you just have to be there. Neither the television nor these inadequate words can possibly convey the extraordinary atmosphere in the Westfalen Stadion in Dortmund nor the magnitude of the Italian team's achievement in conquering it.

Even on a normal day, the place is the world's largest cockpit. Spectators at the front can almost breathe on the pitch. But the terraces behind the goals rise like cliffs. And on Tuesday night these were white cliffs, which happened to be making a deafening noise. Whichever way the Italians turned they faced implacable hostility.

The Germans played in white. Almost everyone in the crowd was in white.

And the coach Jürgen Klinsmann, prowled the touchline in his own crisply pressed white shirt and black trousers; at a quick glance it was easy to mistake him for a 12th man, which in a way he was.

The Italians have been the most strangely passive fans of this entire tournament; even against Ghana they seemed outnumbered and outshouted. As soon as the whistle went to start play in Dortmund, 60,000 more whistles - at that piercing level which is supposed to bring wayward dogs back home - greeted their every move. It made Anfield in Liverpool seem like a Third Division ground.

And that could be very relevant to the Italians. Somewhere in their minds - however much the coach Marcello Lippi denies it - must be the latest legal developments back home. Hours before the semi-final, prosecutors in the football corruption case called for Juventus, employers of five of the players who took the field on Tuesday, to be relegated to Serie C, the Italian third division. It seemed impossible to imagine the players conquering such odds.

They call this stadium "Germany's living room", and before the game everyone was quoting the national team's remarkable record there: 13 wins, a draw and - until Tuesday - no defeats. But actually the stats didn't stand up to examination. The Germans never invited their most important visitors into the living room, and the vast majority of those results were against the likes of Albania and Northern Ireland.

Yes, all the external factors favoured the Germans: the momentum that has built up in the past three weeks seemed with them. But in the end this was a football match. And the judgment expressed by most students of form before the tournament narrowly held good: that Italy, who after all beat Germany 4-1 in a friendly in March, were the better team.

Strip away for a moment the peripherals about the flag, and national unity, and the way the past month has enhanced Germany's image. The most lasting impact of the 2006 World Cup may be Klinsmann's importation of American fitness techniques: first-class cabins on Atlantic flights will henceforth be jammed with football managers anxious to get the message.

But you can't make silk purses out of sow's ears, even in a country where sow's ears (and sow's everything else) are usually on the menu. In the end, all Klinsmann's ideas, and his enthusiasm, could not change what everyone felt a month ago: that his team simply wasn't classy enough.

Class has not been the only currency out here: ask the Brazilians, Argentines and Spaniards, wherever they are this week. This Italian team have never looked obvious finalists - they were nearly mugged by the Australians.

But they have turned out to be the embodiment of the traditional Italian footballing virtues: strong defence (they have now conceded one goal in 10 hours) without sacrificing imaginative ballplay. Even in this atmosphere, they produced some moments of the most nonchalant and impudent football.

And Lippi proved himself the coolest gambler in Germany, starting out with the belief that games are won and lost in midfield, then reinforcing his attack with each substitution, on the understandable assumption that it would be a bad idea to let the Germans take the game to penalties. In successive minutes at the start of extra time, the Italians hit the post and crossbar; these were signals that they not merely could prevail but deserved to do so.

For 119 minutes it seemed there were no Italians in the stadium at all. When the first goal came it became obvious this was untrue: about four flags were unveiled at various points on the cliff-face, and a group in front of me began embracing. Closer inspection revealed them as the Italian press.

Then came goal number two. One of the journalists leapt on to the table and did a jig alongside his laptop. The cliffs fell silent. Italy did not. "Azzurri in finale, piazza in delirio," according to La Gazzetta dello Sport. Pity the poor old German Pope.