History is threatening to put a 12th man on the field for Germany at the Ernst Happel stadium in Vienna tonight and the Spanish must ensure that they are filled with reassurance by the form book rather than dread by the record book. A championship as splendidly memorable as Euro 2008 deserves to produce the right winners and that means Spain.

There is something close to perfection in the severity of their last challenge. Through all their decades of under-achieving (beating the USSR in Madrid to take the continental title in 1964 is the only major international success they can claim) the discrepancy between talent and performance left no alternative but to suspect them of a debilitating lack of collective self-belief, a failure of nerve. Now they come up against the most daunting psychological test any team could face, a confrontation with the juggernaut of mental discipline and competitive will that has made the Germans Europe’s undisputed masters of tournament play, enabling them to reach more finals and do more lifting of trophies than a simple assessment of their abilities sometimes suggested they should. Spain’s present crop of exceptionally gifted players could not ask for a better invitation to expose as glib stereotyping the doubts about the reliability of the national temperament on the football pitch that they have inherited from previous generations. But the opportunity is, of course, double-edged.

If they find themselves incapable of translating their already proven superiority in technique, fluid movement and invention into victory the opprobrium heaped on them by a painfully frustrated nation is liable to exceed anything experienced by their predecessors. They have held out such rich promise, especially in the double devastation of Guus Hiddink’s otherwise impressive Russia, first in the group phase and then in the semi-final, that falling short this evening would bring a disappointment bitter enough to haunt them far beyond the end of their careers.

Such a burden of obligation could smother Spain’s positive instincts but there are good reasons for believing it won’t. The most obvious is that at Euro 2008, in spite of a mighty contribution from Michael Ballack, and the admirable support given to him by Philipp Lahm, Torsten Frings and Lukas Podolski, the core characteristic of Germany as a unit is ordinariness. There seemed justification for assuming they were following their country’s traditional pattern of growing in strength as a tournament develops but the healthy signs disappeared embarrassingly in Wednesday’s semi-final with Turkey, whose defeat was an insult to justice. Now it’s hard to imagine that, even if Ballack survives deep concerns about his fitness, Germany can match the comprehensive excellence of the opposition.

From the goalkeeping of Iker Casillas all the way to the strikers there is exciting quality but Spain’s greatest resource, the most compelling reason for both wanting and expecting them to win this final, is the intimidating armoury of skills at the disposal of the men who operate from the midfield forward. Marcos Senna, a Brazilian who has taken Spanish citizenship, gains and uses possession more tellingly than any other holding player we have seen in Austria and Switzerland and if Xavi Hernandez and Andres Iniesta were surprisingly muted in early matches they have been stirred lately to demonstrate their true value as playmakers by the example of a younger teammate they must acknowledge as their superior.

That 21-year-old Cesc Fabregas has made all but one of his appearances so far as a substitute betrays the willingness of Spain’s 70-year-old coach, Luis Aragones, to let stubbornness topple over into destructive inflexibility. But the limiting of his participation has not prevented the Arsenal man from confirming that he is not simply the most creative architect of penetration available to his country but conceivably the ultimate practitioner of the art in all of football today. And he is as brave as he is talented, constantly displaying not just the physical version of courage but that rarer form so often lauded by Sir Alex Ferguson, the kind that makes a player eager to embrace responsibility, to think always not of what will make him look good but what will benefit the team. As it happens, Fabregas’s innate style almost invariably causes him to look good whatever he does.

Even if an injury to his most effective forward, David Villa, had not simplified the choices of Aragones, the coach would surely have realised that he could no longer regard as a substitute the footballer who so wonderfully embodies virtually everything appealing about the Spanish bid for glory at Euro 2008. Fabregas will start and, if fate treats him fairly, he will finish with a winner’s medal.

Tennis’s old guard is toiling

At least the blows to British spirits at Wimbledon land on thick layers of calloused tissue. Only the perverse could take consolation in the scars left by a record of failure so monumental that nobody under 80 can be expected to remember seeing the last men’s singles final in which we had a challenger (he was Bunny Austin, who was battered 6-1 6-0 6-3 by Donald Budge in 1938), let alone the completion of a hat-trick of championship victories by Fred Perry two years earlier. But as the supreme connoisseurs of suffering in SW19 we should have the grace to admit that the pain being endured these days by Americans and Australians must be much harder to bear.

During the 72 years that we have been waiting for another Perry, players from the US have claimed the men’s title 27 times and the equivalent total for Australia is 16. Yet the tattered banner of British tennis has, thanks to Andy Murray, already been carried further at Wimbledon this summer than anybody identified with the Stars and Stripes has been able to reach and Australia’s colours, too, appear likely to be conclusively lowered when Lleyton Hewitt faces Roger Federer in the fourth round tomorrow. Hewitt was the last champion to be crowned on Centre Court before Federer began the dominance he is now trying to extend to a sixth year but the statistics of their previous meetings are hugely in favour of the Swiss virtuoso and he is long odds-on to defeat an opponent who has dropped to 27 in the world rankings.

Andy Roddick is ranked at number six and he was seeded in that position for Wimbledon – where he lost to Federer in the finals of 2004 and 2005 – but when both he and James Blake were brusquely eliminated on Thursday the obscure Bobby Reynolds became the US’s sole representative in the third round and Reynolds was duly dispatched by Feliciano Lopez of Spain. Obliteration in the first week was quite a humiliation for the land of Pete Sampras, John McEnroe, Jimmy Connors, Andre Agassi et al to stomach less than a decade after Sampras lifted his seventh title. And, though Australia long ago ceased to be a reliable heavyweight of the game (its golden age was between 1956 and 1971 when, almost miraculously, it provided the Wimbledon champion in 13 out of 16 years), the current frailty of the antipodean presence is yet another indication of just how much of a revolutionary shift of power has occurred of late in male tennis.

Of course, writing off any Australian, and especially one as combative as Hewitt, is a dangerous practice but it seems that his unavoidable role tomorrow will be to underline the astonishing truth that in the men’s game nowadays his country and the US are struggling to escape marginalisation.

We’ll miss Motson

As John Motson delivers his last big-match commentary for the BBC at the Euro 2008 final in Vienna tonight, some of my thoughts about fond encounters with him over the years won’t concern football but the more financially fraught action of the racecourse. Occasionally we have found ourselves in the company of Sir Peter O’Sullevan, who once treated John to the ambiguous reassurance that it was a commentator’s lot to be remembered for his gaffes rather than his precise descriptions or his bons mots. Of course, it was with eccentricity, not error, that our most cherished football broadcaster tended to punctuate his dedicated professionalism. In common with millions, I’ll miss Motty at the mic.