Wait… Germany Got Knocked Out In The Group Stages!?
Before the World Cup started, this beautiful amazing unpredictable World Cup, I wanted to write a thing called ‘Which Of The Big Teams Is Most Likely To Get Knocked Out In The First Round?’ Because, you know, there’s always at least one. Spoiler alert: it was gonna be Argentina.
The Argies had all the hallmarks of an underachieving team. An overreliance on their best player, an unpredictable defence, sketchy performances in qualifying, a difficult group… and that unpublished prediction was only five minutes away from coming true. You knew you’d witnessed a miracle goal when Marcos Rojo used his right foot for something other than a sliding tackle.
But I never would’ve suggested Germany, bloody hell. And yet there it was happening before our very eyes, the limp collapse of the defending world champions. They were tactically awful in losing 1-0 to Mexico, needed a late screamer from Toni Kroos to beat Sweden 2-1 in injury time and then conceded twice at the appropriately-labelled death to lose 2-0 to South Korea. Even if South Korea hadn’t scored though, Germany still needed to win to advance and they were running it rather late to do that. Germany knocked out of the competition in the group stages for the first time since 1938…it was almost surreal.
What went wrong? The obvious problem was that they weren’t able to do what German sides of the past always seemed to do so well and put away their chances. Timo Werner is a great player, a fantastic young forward, but he wasn’t the striker that they needed in this situation. It’s a position that’s haunted Germany for a while, the one position where technical excellence and tactical proficiency sometimes gives way to pure instinct and determination. They still haven’t replaced Mirolav Klose.
It’s been a recurring theme lately but the teams that are doing the best so far are the ones with genuine centre-forwards to work around. Romelu Lukaku, Harry Kane, Diego Costa, Cristiano Ronaldo, etc. Germany never had that and they proceeded to waste chance after chance after chance. 67% possession against Mexico, 76% against Sweden and 74% against South Korea. They scored two goals from 21 total shots on target, which came from 72 shots all together. 25 attacking corners in three games. Gotta put those opportunities away, mate.
Of course, that’s just one problem. It sure didn’t help that they surged forward in a way that left their two centre-backs completely exposed on the counter attack. Mats Hummels made sure everyone knew how he felt about that after the defeat to Mexico. And regardless of which side of the Mesut Ozil debate that you fall on, making drastic changes to the starting XI with each game never helps things. Four changes between the first and second game and then five more between the second and third. Then to a lesser extent there was a not-fully-fit Manuel Neuer and the lack of a holding midfielder also contributing to things. About the only thing that didn’t make a difference was Leroy Sane getting dropped.
But Der Mannschaft’s biggest problem was complacency. Same as we keep seeing from defending champions over and over again. The only thing harder than winning the World Cup is defending it, you have to go back 1994 for the last time that a team other than Brazil made it out of the groups as reigning champs… and that was Germany, funnily enough. France didn’t even scored a goal in 2002. Italy didn’t win a game in 2010, coming last in a group that had New Zealand in it for chrissake. Spain won three major tournaments in a row but their 2014 World Cup was a shocker. Now we’ve got Germany to add to the crew.
It’s no coincidence that this trend is becoming more prevalent nowadays. Football’s too global, too popular, too competitive for teams to be able to coast off past success. Win the World Cup and there’s a target on your back. There’s definitely no more element of surprise when playing against teams from other continents these days either.
Then there’s that natural easing off that comes with achieving the ultimate success. All that it took to get there… how are you supposed to repeat that enormous effort again when you’ve already had your vindication? To be a World Cup winner, it doesn’t get more prestigious than that. Every one of those players from the 2014 Germany team came away with an aura about them and, four years later, that can make it tough to be completely honest when assessing them. Germany were harsher than most, Joachim Low still had the guts to drop Mario Gotze, but he very clearly didn’t get the best out of the returning 2014 players that he did pick.
This is a problem that flows from both sides. The coaching staff can be too loyal to the ones that won it for them last time while the players themselves can come in under-motivated, at least compared to the desperation of the rivals that they triumphed ahead of last time. Although even then the two teams that Germany beat in the semis and the final in 2014, Brazil and Argentina, only barely managed to scrape through into the knockouts themselves (both teams with good centre-forwards, fitting the theory, but also teams whose creative reliance is on deeper players hence those centre-forwards aren’t getting them the goals that they need).
It’s probably fair to say that when France stumbled out of the 2002 World Cup, people blamed it on the French being French. Typical old fickle France, aye? And when Italy choked it up in 2010, well, the Italians are always on and off and on and off, almost like they plot their World Cups out in binary code. Even Spain in 2014 it was like they’d been so reliant on a revolutionary style of play that when it failed them against the Netherlands and Chile (two teams that didn’t even qualify in 2018) the feeling was that their time had passed. They lost because teams had figured them out finally.
Except now Germany’s done the same thing. And if it can happen to Germany then it can happen to anyone. This ain’t to say that France’s footy teams don’t run hot and cold or that Spain weren’t overdue a little tweak to the tiki taka tactics but the fact is that trying to defend the World Cup is a damn near impossible task.
Although… if Robert Lewandowski had been German and not Polish, playing with a bunch of his Bayern teammates and not a mostly average Poland team where he barely gets a crack at goal and then gets blamed for not performing on the big stage even though he scores Champions League goals for fun (remember when he scored four against Real Madrid?)… one wonders if this otherwise identical Germany team wouldn’t still be there.
Whack an ad if you dug all that and drop some digital coinage over at Patreon to support the TNC revolution, independent kiwi media’s gotta survive somehow