German national team: Howl!

When Hansi Flick stood in front of his players in the FC Bayern dressing room in November 2019, he said: I know that you are a good team. I know you can play a lot better than you did last. The interim trainer Flick then told the players that he wanted to let them play completely differently than their predecessor Niko Kovac, he briefly explained the main features of the new idea, and then they were all out together and had a good training session. Two days later they defeated Olympiacos 2-0 in the Champions League, three days later they shot Borussia Dortmund 4-0 off the pitch. The fairy tale began. 34 games later, Flick and his players had won the triple.

There was once. Will it be like that again soon?

The new national coach Hansi Flick could copy & paste when he comes back to his players at the end of August, but maybe he should come up with a few new sentences. The risk of being caught plagiarizing himself is simply too great. Flick will find a few contemporary witnesses from back then in the cabin of the national team, Manuel Neuer, Joshua Kimmich, Leon Goretzka, Serge Gnabry and Jamal Musiala, probably also Leroy Sané and Niklas Süle, probably also Thomas Müller. You could say, hey coach, we’ve heard that before On the other hand, why shouldn’t one be allowed to repeat oneself when it is the truth?

Flick is convinced that the national team is a good team. He is convinced that she can play a lot better than last time.

On the last weekend of the tournament, the DFB-Elf had nothing to do with this sporting event, the final of which is now taking place at Wembley Stadium – in that holy place where the German team passed away unholy over a week and a half ago. You can’t really say that she was eliminated, it would have required a football game with a somehow designed dramaturgy, but the Germans were just kind of gone after 90 minutes.

Can’t the Germans do better at the moment or have they just stayed below their options?

Now that the tournament brings together two teams in the final that deserve this final, it’s worth taking another look back at Wembley Stadium and looking at Joshua Kimmich’s face. Kimmich can look so grim that you tend to forget the generally cheerful person behind it, sometimes Kimmich even cheers in such a way that you, as an innocent teammate, are afraid. But like after the 2-0 draw in the second round, Kimmich was not known. One time he was seen leaning on Manuel Neuer’s shoulder, another time he was supported by the aged Mats Hummels. Kimmich had tears in his eyes, it was a low, eerie cry.

Maybe from the players’ point of view it really is a crying cry that the German team gambled away any right to this final against England. A final that she could have been in.

Since then, the big question has been whether the Germans cannot do better at the moment or whether they have just stayed below their possibilities. The players have long since answered this question for themselves, as Kimmich’s tears show. To be on the safe side, Thomas Müller and Mats Hummels have added a little text to the tears. “The troop had the quality, the will and also the work ethic to build on old successes again,” wrote Thomas Müller in a newsletter, which apparently belongs to the accompanying services of the broadcaster “Radio Müller”. Mats Hummels was on Instagram even more clearly: “I thought we had what it took to win this tournament,” he posted in the team bus on the way back from the stadium. Even DFB director Oliver Bierhoff, responsible for Jogi Löw’s permanent position in office according to the association’s hierarchy, called the English “beatable” the next day.

That’s why Kimmich wept: he mourned a missed opportunity. The players seem to think that a tournament was given away here, and not by them.

What the Italians and the English have done, the Germans could have done too

The charm of this EM is that it is not a hero tournament. No Cristiano Ronaldo hijacked the headlines, neither Paul Pogba nor Kylian Mbappé led their country single-handedly into the final, and the only one who would have been trusted – Belgian Kevin de Bruyne – was not healthy enough. The stars of this tournament are the coaches who composed the final teams, the Italian Roberto Mancini, the English Gareth Southgate. Against this background, the contributions by Müller, Hummels and Bierhoff seem like letters to Jogi Löw: That, dear coach, we could have done – with another trainer. Or with the same trainer, but then with a different coaching.

What the Italians and the English did, the Germans could have done too, or rather: They even did it, a few weeks ago, in another place. At the U21 European Championship, the DFB selection demonstrated all the characteristics that German football needs in a tournament. The Germans by no means had the most geniuses in their squad, they were the Italians of the U21 tournament. They started with a coherent system, each player played in his best position, everything looked smooth and practiced, and almost every second you could see the passion of a team that believes in the coach’s plan. And yes, that too: The trainer Stefan Kuntz did not coach stubbornly against the trend like Jogi Löw, who replaced Kai Havertz against Hungary after a goal and thus the waves – instead of riding them – simply broke.

To learn from Italy and England means first of all not to coach against the temperament of a team in the tournament, so not to take a stormy team captive, as Löw did, of course with the best of intentions. But this EM points far beyond the tournament format, it also formulates an order for the most sacred DFB academy, from which Oliver Bierhoff promises at least the salvation of the world. At this tournament, players who had taken detours shone, such as Spain’s Dani Olmo, who left Barcelona’s youth academy at the age of 16 to play in Croatia; it shone players who have developed in niches in Sassuolo (Manuel Locatelli, Domenico Berardi) or Mödling (Sasa Kalajdzic); Late-career professionals such as the Italian Leonardo Spinazzola, the English Kalvin Phillips or the DFB player Robin Gosens from Bergamo also shone. The tournament can be read as a plea to understand an academy not as a supervisory authority with tactical authority, but to allow a second educational path. And don’t write off players or re-educate them in an equalizing sense, if at the age of 14 or 16 they may seem like bony defenders or edgy center-forwards. Löw could have used precisely such specialists in the tournament.

The World Cup in Qatar will begin in 15 months, it will come too early to reflect a changed youth strategy. But in order not to coach an elf away from their strengths and let the players off the leash again, it should be enough for that.