Before the last World Cup, an advertisement ran on French television trying to lure women on Swiss holidays. Featuring handsome, scantily clad mountain men, its payoff line was: “Dear girls, why not escape this summer’s World Cup to a country where men spend less time on football and more on you?”

Switzerland, almost uniquely in Europe, has never cared much about football. But on Sunday the Swiss tourist town of Lucerne stages the draw for Euro 2008. The tournament, which Switzerland is co-hosting with Austria, will be the country’s biggest sports event ever. By their own standards, the Swiss have a good young team. The world is increasingly going nuts for football. Surely Switzerland is getting at least a tiny bit excited? Well, you would have thought so. Ditching all stereotypes about a fun-hating nation, it seemed best to ask the Swiss themselves how things stand. Admittedly, in football they start from a long way back. This was always a skiing country, where the nation’s streets would empty – or become even more deserted than usual – for obscure polysyllabic downhill events. Football was a different matter. Last year I visited an exhibition called “Football Fever” at the Swiss Sports Museum in Basle. After ringing the doorbell I was finally let in by a guard, who said I was the only visitor. The exhibition revealed that the most significant Swiss in football history was a postal worker called Gottfried Dienst, who refereed the 1966 world cup final and ruled (probably wrongly) that Geoff Hurst’s shot against the underside of the bar had in fact crossed the goal line. The exhibition records Dienst’s conversation with his Azerbaijani linesman in full: