BERLIN, Germany – France vs. Italy? That’s not the World Cup final that anyone predicted, but that’s the World Cup final we’ve got. So have we got the two best teams in the final? You could argue that we have.

Italy is there because it was able to overcome host nation Germany, which was beginning to look invincible after a run of five wins. And France pulled off what before the tournament had been considered an almost impossible feat when it beat Brazil, then followed that with a 2-0 win over Portugal yesterday.

Remarkable achievements both, but there is less here than meets the eye.The Germans, for a start, were nowhere near as good as the press hype and the public adulation suggested. They won their first four games against inferior opponents: Costa Rica, Poland, Ecuador, and Sweden.

The first time Germany played against a strong team – Argentina, in the quarterfinals – it faltered badly. In fact, the Germans were pretty comprehensively outplayed by Argentina and needed a penalty kick shootout, in which their World Cup record is perfect, to triumph.

The weakness of the German play against Argentina – namely its inability to maintain possession and put together dangerous passing movements – suggested that it would find the Italians a difficult team to beat in Tuesday’s semifinal.

Just so. The Italians have been getting better with every game, as is their traditional way of doing things in tournaments. It is true that they needed overtime to beat the Germans 2-0, but those two late goals carry a significant message.

The days when Italian teams were primarily defensive, when they practiced the dreaded catenaccio and ground out tedious 1-0 wins, are gone. But there remains in the Italian game an unwillingness to take risks.

We saw it in the Italy vs. America game, when the Italians, with a man advantage, did not go all out for a win, but settled for a tie. But that was a firstround game. Against Germany, there could be no tie – what was looming as the game stretched into overtime was the possibility of a penalty kick shootout. Marcello Lippi, the Italian coach, knew all about the Germans’ strength in the tiebreaker and decided the game had to be won during the overtime period. He did the very un-Italian thing,taking the risk of using all three of his substitutions late in the game to send on attacking players.

The gamble paid off, and just in time. The goals by Fabio Grosso and Alessandro Del Piero came in the final minute of overtime, but they were the just reward for the team that had been superior throughout the game, the team that had dared to risk taking its foot off the brakes and to play full-blooded attacking soccer.

Admittedly, that verdict is a trifle unfair to the Germans, who, in a rather simple-minded way, did their share of attacking. But the mediocre quality of their play, disguised early in the tournament by weak opponents and a suffocating atmosphere of triumphalism, was exposed by the Argentines and brutally exploited by the Italians.

Jurgen Klinsmann, the German coach, smiling, sensible, and gracious in defeat, had built a team of youngsters with little more than enthusiasm and the traditional German fighting spirit to see them through. Actually, there was more, there was a foreign touch. Klinsmann had declared himself an admirer of American methods, and he employed a California team of fitness experts to get his players in shape. This was always an odd decision, because if there is one thing that German teams have never been accused of lacking, it is fitness.

And when the big test of the Germans’ fitness came, in the overtime periods of its last two games, it was the Argentines and the Italians who looked fresher and who played the better soccer.

France’s quarterfinal win over Brazil has to be explained more in terms of how the Brazilians lost the game than how the French won it. Brazil entered the tournament as red hot favorites partly because of their superb record in World Cups, but also because they had in Ronaldo, Ronaldinho, Adriano, Kaka, and Robinho a superb quintet of creative attacking players – which is five times as many as any other team could assemble.

Astoundingly, not one of those five players caught fire in Germany. Ronaldinho could certainly be tagged as the flop of the tournament; both Ronaldo and Adriano looked slow and clumsy, while Robinho’s appearances as a substitute were uniformly bland.Only Kaka played consistently well, without ever being brilliant.

We waited, through each Brazil game, for the tempo and intensity of the soccer to increase, but it never happened: Brazil simply never looked like Brazil. The sweeping flow of Brazilian attacking soccer, the intricate passing sequences were never there. Instead, we watched in disbelief as a succession of English-style long balls were pumped up to the far-from-mobile Ronaldo, who rarely bothered to chase any of them.

The French had no trouble dealing with that, and they retaliated with a wonderful performance from 34-year-old Zinedine Zidane, a blazing answer to those – this writer among them – who felt his best days were gone.

Yesterday’s semifinal between France and Portugal was a game virtually devoid of entertainment value – few shots on goal, not much coherent team play, and only one goal, which arrived via a penalty kick. What had been billed as a duel between the two senior Galacticos of the Real Madrid team from a year ago – Zidane and Luis Figo – turned into a pretty drab contest. Zidane scored the goal, so maybe he came out on top, but Portugal was the more enterprising team throughout.

So we have our unlikely final, France vs Italy.The wild street celebrations that greeted every German win have simply vanished, and something like normality is returning to Germany after nearly a month of over-the-top hope and hype.

The scalpers who were going to clean up by selling tickets that would allow German fans to watch their team take the world title, are in trouble. Germany will not be playing in the final in Berlin on Sunday. Instead it will travel to Stuttgart to play in the third-place game against Portugal.

The Germans are putting a brave face on things, but there is no disguising the fact that a third-place game is the “losers’ final.” That is not what coach Klinsmann and his team – and the entire German nation – had in mind as a climax for this World Cup.

pgardner@nysun.com