In the aftermath, Neuer’s serious leg injury in a skiing accident took away one of Flick’s senior players and called into question the professional standards of his squad, even if Neuer was at pains to point out that he had been trekking rather than downhill skiing. The row with Fifa over the wearing (or not) of the One Love armband by captain Manuel Neuer and the team’s subsequent photo protest overshadowed the start of the World Cup, a tournament which Germany’s football public really struggled to muster enthusiasm for. That his fly-by-the-seat-of-pants style might have had a shelf life was underlined by the amount of defensive gremlins that were left for his successor, Julian Nagelsmann, to deal with.Įvents outside his control worked against him too. He had been fortunate to have big personalities with wounded pride to rely on in the dressing room at Bayern. A year later, after taking over a squad that had been slumping for some time under Jogi Löw, perhaps a little more detail was required to turn things around. He took Bayern to the treble in 2020 in thrilling fashion, with football that was as reckless as it was gripping. By German standards, Wolfsburg is hardly Galatasaray away.įlick certainly deserves to shoulder his share of the blame. One almost wondered if the Japan game had been set in the Autostadt, which is home to the modestly-sized Volkswagen Arena, to minimise the opprobrium this fragile team would receive. Photograph: Ronny Hartmann/AFP/Getty Images Rudi Völler (left) will take charge of Germany for Tuesday’s friendly against France with Sandro Wagner (centre) and Hannes Wolf assisting. Further forward, only young Florian Wirtz emerged blameless, with Kai Havertz again labouring at centre-forward, where the injured Niclas Füllkrug, the 30-year-old who made his full debut last year, was badly missed. They were dreadful in defence, collectively disorganised and further undermined by individual errors, with protection from only Emre Can in front. If you wanted a concise case study of where Germany have been at in recent times, then Saturday’s defeat in Wolfsburg was perfect. Germany’s results have been disappointing. Even if it can be a struggle to muster the right intensity in preparation friendly matches instead of qualifiers ahead of hosting a tournament, this was something else. The loss to Japan was their third in a row, the team’s worst run since 1985. Following the group stage exit at the Qatar World Cup, Germany won their first match of 2023, a friendly with Peru in Mainz. Their recent record has been startlingly poor. Yet with Germany, one of Europe’s and the world’s most decorated football nations, the feeling that they were heading for a damp squib of a performance on the pitch next summer was, and is, entirely justifiable. For host nations to worry that they are going to show themselves up in front of the world ahead of putting on a major tournament is nothing new. On Wednesday there will be exactly nine months to the start of Euro 2024, which Germany will kick off with the opening match in the Allianz Arena in Munich, the setting for some of Flick’s greatest career triumphs. The Deutscher Fußball-Bund (DFB) announced his sacking on Sunday afternoon while Germany’s basketball team were midway through a magnificent victory in the World Cup final with Serbia – underlining, on one hand, the clumsiness and the dysfunctional workings of the body at board level, and on the other communicating the sense of panic that led them to this point. If Hansi Flick had hoped this nadir would be the first step on a similar path to glorious redemption, it quickly became clear that there was to be no reprise of that scenario. When France lost to a late Alan Shearer goal in their second game of the tournament in June 1997, cries of ‘Jacquet démission’ (‘Jacquet resign’) tumbled from the stands of the Mosson in Montpellier. It wasn’t only about Roberto Carlos’s banana free-kick and the emergence of Paul Scholes, but about French supporters venting their frustrations with their national coach, Aimé Jacquet. The chorus of boos that ushered Germany’s team from the field at full time after Saturday’s humbling at home to Japan might have taken supporters of a certain vintage back 26 years, to Le Tournoi.
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