Italy’s Mario Balotelli singlehandedly ended Germany’s chances at winning the Euro 2012 Cup with two devastating goals in the first half. The first was a header thanks to a brilliant cross by Antonio Cassano. Balotelli simply cleaned up the mess. For his second goal, however, Balotelli completed the job with a fantastic goal, courtesy of a breakaway Germany clearly forgot how to defend.

Due to UEFA’s ridiculous attitude towards Euro highlights showing up on YouTube, or, well anywhere else, acquiring footage of these goals is problematic. Adding insult to the UEFA’s lack of web-savvy insults is the fact that the official site is absolute horrible quality regarding Euro 2012 highlights. To wit, they can’t even be bothered to upload hi-def versions of these plays people love to watch. I mean, why monetize your content on YouTube when you can prevent the rest of the world from enjoying it?

Or something like that.

Anyway, one area the strong arm of UEFA’s content control hasn’t touched is the revitalized image format that is animated gifs, and while I haven’t seen one of Balotelli’s second goal, the one of his following celebration will live on, perhaps forever:

Just ask Germany about the whack job Balotelli did to them.