Friday, June 29

By Nick Ames in Kiev

There will be no double celebration for Lukas Podolski on Sunday. The German attacker officially becomes an Arsenal player on July 1, and had been hotly tipped to contest the final of Euro 2012 the very same day.

Last night, though, little went right for Lukas or his team. Replaced by Marco Reus after an opening 45 minutes in which the outstanding Mario Balotelli hit all the right notes, he was unable to help Joachim Low’s side claw its way back into a game that rapidly slipped away from them.

If Balotelli’s first goal rattled the Germans, his second visibly sapped their spirit and, despite Mesut Ozil’s injury-time penalty, they never really looked like denying Cesare Prandelli’s highly-watchable side a place in the final here in Kiev.

Twenty-one of Euro 2012’s 30 games have held some kind of direct Arsenal interest - a figure that I’m not sure any other club can boast. It’s a shame that the final will not be one of those. The smart money ahead of the tournament was certainly on Lukas and Per Mertesacker being the last men standing of the 10 Gunners representatives here, and a semi-final exit was not part of the plan.

Kiev prepares for a meeting of Spain and Italy, then, despite clearly hoping for a German presence. The city’s huge Fanzone was as packed as I’d seen it last night, ‘Nationalmannschaft’ shirts having sprung from nowhere and their owners, more often than not, speaking Ukrainian or Russian. The air of disappointment at the end was heavy, surprisingly so given the lack of an obvious stake in Germany’s success. It seemed to weigh more on some than on others, with a couple of scuffles breaking out.

In my own way, I’ll stay out here to fly the Arsenal flag a tiny bit longer. This blog is being written, somewhat blearily, at 6am - shortly, I’ll be making the two-hour trip south to Bila Tserkva to see the local Ukrainian second-tier side, Arsenal, put through some of its pre-season paces in a forest.

It’s been kindly arranged by my local friend Alex, and I’ll report back on how yet another team with the Gunners moniker goes about its business. After that, it might be time to look at organising some transport home for the next few days.

It feels frustrating not to see this three-week long charting of Arsenal’s Euro 2012 involvement through to what could have been a memorable finale, but a number of Gunners can consider their stock well and truly raised as a result of this tournament. In tomorrow’s blog, I’ll recap the highs and lows our contingent has experienced this summer.

EURO 2012 BLOG ARCHIVE:

Copyright 2013 The Arsenal Football Club plc. Permission to use quotations from this article is granted subject to appropriate credit being given to www.arsenal.com as the source 29 Jun 2012