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Arsenal gaffer Arsene Wenger must have been chuffed to bits to see Cesc Fabregas’ performance for Spain against Russia the other night. Then again, perhaps he wasn’t. For you can bet Fabregas will now be on the wanted list of some of Europe’s biggest clubs – if he wasn’t there already, that is.

Fabregas’s clever passing destroyed Russia in the semi-final, and that won’t have gone unseen by the rest of Europe. For most of this summer, Arsenal have been battling to hold on to their best players. The Gunners have already lost Mathieu Flamini to AC Milan, Alexander Hleb has been tipped to join Barcelona, and both those clubs have also been linked with Emmanuel Adebayor.

“Many clubs do not work …

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Sometimes, a man has to have some principles and stand up for what he believes in. And now that time has come for me to defiantly shake my fist in support of the much-maligned German football team. I can’t take it anymore, and something has to be done.

If I hear one more football TV pundit mutter about ‘lucky Germany’ or ‘you can never write off the Germans’ or ‘Germany haven’t played well but they keep winning’, I swear I’ll put my feet and fists through my 30inch flat screen and batter it into a pulp of wires. It’s a load of rubbish. The reason you can’t write off the Germans is that they’re a good team. Not lucky, just good. …

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A lot of people are aware that poker can be extremely simple or deeply complex. When it is the latter, one of the most likely reasons is that the players are implementing aspects of game theory.

In its simplest terms, it is an attempt to study situations in which the success of an individual’s choices depends on the reading of the action sof others. Let us give you an example, one that is quite similar to one posted last Friday and may leave the regular reader wondering if a) this column is turning into a series depicting dating disasters, or b) the team of writers ever get laid.

Three men are playing pinball in a hockey ‘n ribs bar.

Minutes later three …

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 Woah, Spain have set up what´s gonna be some final against Germany on Sunday with a classy 3-0 spanking of Russia in Vienna.

Luis Aragones´s men were absolutely superb, especially Liverpool´s Fernando Torres and Arsenal´s Cesc Fabregas. And what about all-action man Sergi Ramos? He must have run the length of a marathon down that right flank for the Spanish cause.

The Beat´s tip to score the first goal - David Villa - suffered the cruel fate of a pulling a leg muscle on 30 minutes and we´re told he´ll now miss the final. Fiddlesticks.

It didn´t matter because Russia never got going and produced little of the form that saw them beat Holland in the last eight. Their highly rated playmaker Andrei …

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