大象传媒

Vienna

I wonder what Zinedine Zidane made of it all? A Frenchman who spent the best years of his glittering football career playing in Italy and Spain, he was at the Ernst Happel Stadium on Sunday night to see the .

On paper - rather an outdated phrase, don't you think? - this should have been a classic, but then football's history is littered with games that have failed to live up their pre-match hype.

I don't suppose fans of the Spanish national team care one little bit. As long as Iker Casillas and co go on to lift the country's next weekend, they won't worry how they ended their barren run.

And having done their fair share of entertaining in the past, they can be excused a few drab performances now. Not that the game against Italy was totally without merit.

For me, the player that stood out head and shoulders above everyone else, even goalkeeper Casillas, on a hot and balmy night in Vienna was .

He's not a Zizou or a Michel Platini, but the Brazilian-born midfielder, 32 next month, is mightily effective. He can pass the ball well with either foot; he can inject some much-needed pace into a game when required and also slow it down if necessary; he supports his team-mates both in attack and defence, and he appears to have an engine that runs and runs and runs.

He's also got a venomous shot and is cool under pressure, as his brilliant spotkick in the penalty shoot-out win over Italy wonderfully demonstrated. No wonder a couple of seasons back.

Senna will need to be at his best again in the semi-finals, when will pose very different problems to the ones faced by the Spanish last night. But, for now, he and the rest of his team can take great heart from their latest win. Even an inferior Italian side as this one was is a big scalp.

As for Zidane, well, he's off to try on more adidas trainers and teach young kids some of the skills that made him one of the greatest players to lace up - again another phrase that is fast becoming redundant - a pair of football boots.

It's been two years since he bowed out of football in , yet he is still a big draw.

In town on a promotional tour, he had journalists clamouring for a piece of him when he turned up for a quick chat at Vienna's on Sunday afternoon.

The press conference was due to start at 4pm but reporters and camera crews started arriving almost two hours before, eager to plonk themselves and their equipment in the best spot possible.

By the scheduled start time, the room was packed, not to mention a little stuffy. Then an apologetic adidas spokesman announced there would be a delay and we'd have to sit tight for another 30 minutes. Not everyone did, some disgruntled scribes heading for the door, but the majority stayed put, albeit after heading to the free bar for some much-needed sustenance.

Appropriately, if a little school masterish, the same adidas chap blew a referee's whistle to signal the imminent arrival of Zidane. The photographers who had turned up took this as a sign to move forward en masse in a bid to get the best shot of the Frenchman as he entered stage left - and they kept on clicking away for the entire time he spoke, though that seemed to matter little to the man they had in their sights.

Inevitably, the first questioner wanted to know Zidane's opinion of Euro 2008, before others asked what he thought of Andrei Arshavin and Russia's victory over the much-fancied Netherlands the night before. Zidane explained that he thought the Russian number 10 was a very good player with "great feet", admitting he was a little unsure how to pronounce his name correctly.

The was a hot topic for some in the room, but Zidane, other than telling us he thought some of the criticism of his former team-mates was "a little mean", refused to be drawn into too deep a conversation.

Asked if he fancied succeeding , he said coaching was not for him, although he did add that he wanted some future role in football.

Maybe it's a position in Real Madrid's PR department he's after. He certainly helped the Spanish club's cause by suggesting this summer.

And what did he think would happen in the night's big game between Spain and Italy? Well, he said, it would be a "great match". I wonder what his verdict is now?