Which Spaniard deserves a smacked bottom?

Big tournaments always seperate the wheat from the chaff, the goats from the sheep, the real heroes from the posers wearing drainpipes etc. And this year has been no different. Going in, everyone was blathering about Ronaldo, and saying things like “it could be France’s year, seriously, I just know it”. How wrong those idiots were.

Make no mistake, it’s been a great tournament, and there is still time for some big names to become great again, but for now, The Spoiler barometer has cast it’s aspersions. Don’t fight it, drink it in.

Topping the table with a phenomenol run is Valencia’s David Villa - a man who can somehow make time to fashion a pencil beard and score four goals for Spain. He has left Torres in the shade. To think he was going to go to Tottenham. Hilarious.

Also on the up and up is Russia’s revelation Andrei Arshavin, one of the Zenit St Petersburg crop. His lofty Russian wages won’t scare off the bigger names in Europe post-tournament, so expect to hear much more from him.

Those two are joined in the top half of the barometer by Wesley Sneijder - the pick of the excellent Holland team - and Turkey’s Nihat Kahveci, who scored probably the best goal so far against Petr Cech, supposedly the best goalkeeper in the world.

Sliding down towards the other end is Germany’s Klose - tipped to be the top scorer in the whole competition, having scored thirty-nine goals for Germany from seventy-eight games, but what has he done? Nothing. No one’s even sure that he’s done any running. He just stands there, totally silent. It’s weird.

Elsewhere - more specifically, in France - Karim Benzema was supposed to light up the stage in a Rooney-esque (c. 2004) fashion and become wedged in our hearts for years to come, but bar a nifty injury time run against the Italians, he let everyone down badly. Man United may yet swoop in and poach him while he’s still in tears.

And languishing at the toilet end of the scale, where absolutely everything seems to be going bosoms upwards, are Luca Toni and Cesc Fabregas. One is a gargantuan striker who has made missing Euro 2008 goals his thing, and the other is Fabregas, so influential for Arsenal, and yet slightly timid and nervous in a Spanish jersey, What is wrong with him? Where is the young man taking games by the throat? One or two little glimpses is not enough for one of the Premier League’s finest.