International Break Wrap-Up

By: Jan | October 19th, 2007

Podolski - Frings I used the international break to play the lazy card and take the week off. Maybe I would have felt the urge to blog if someone had packed a bit more excitement into Germany’s two Euro 2008 qualifiers. Now I’m really looking forward to the Bundesliga, Champions League and UEFA Cup again.

In any case, you can always check out Angela’s Germany Blog over at the World Cup Blog, which also covers the Euros.

Last Saturday Germany played out a boring, boring 0-0 draw against Ireland, and got the one remaining point, that was needed to qualify for the Euros. Jens Lehmann actually had a great match but that didn’t stop Arsene Wenger from completely leaving him out of the squad for Arsenal’s next match against Bolton.

Jogi’s team set a new record, as no other German national team had previously managed to qualify so early for a major tournament. Which brought up the question, how to proceed with the remaining qualifying matches, especially the last two in November. Use them as a testing ground or rather try to keep the momentum going and play with the best possible line-ups?

The question for the Czech Republic fixture, was more about whether the team would be motivated enough to take the match serious and give a hundred per cent? Short answer: no.

It was the worst performance of the national team since Jogi Löw took over and the team was subsequently beaten 3-0 and booed out of the stadium. Jogi Löw bemoaned, that his team doesn’t deserve to be booed after all they achieved. Though, I have some sympathy for the people in the stadium, who paid money to see the match and then got absolutely zero back from the team. No commitment, no nothing.

Outside of this lack of motivation, which subsequently caused a lot of simple errors, here are other contributing factors.

The run of play: a very mild excuse, but the early lead clearly favoured the Czech Republic, who had come to defend and counter attack. Kurnayi (2x) and Schweinsteiger (1x) could have brought Germany back into the match, and maybe there would have been a chance to change the rhythm in Germany’s favour (doubtful).
Injuries: this is an excuse that feels remarkably fresh, despite the fact that Germany is coping with long injury lists for half a year now. But this time it didn’t work out. It’s not just that four key players were missing (Lahm, Ballack, Schneider, Klose), proper backup solutions were missing as well (the likes of Pander, Hilbert, Hitzlesperger, Borowski, Kehl…). Instead there were one-trick ponies like Trochowski and Odonkor in the starting XI.
Out of form: Podolski and Frings are the most prominent candidates for this excuse.
Blatant tactical errors: the simple trick of playing long balls to Koller who drops them to his team mates, didn’t work for the Czech Republic at all in the first match. This time around they scored two goals this way and bridged Germany’s midfield at will.
Czech Republic was too strong: they were motivated. They were defending very well and cleverly compressed the space when Germany had the ball. They threw themselves into possible quick counter attacks and thus killing them all except for one which resulted in Schweinsteiger’s great chance. Generally there were as many things good about this team, as there things bad about Germany that evening.