The 2021 international year ended with a 4:1 win in Armenia For the new national coach Hansi Flick it was the seventh win in the seventh match. A review and outlook.
What remains of this international match year 2021? Thomas Müller, World Champion 2014 and three times each at a World and European Championship, with the experience of his 110 international matches and 32 years of life, is an ideal key witness for the appropriate answer, which he aptly bundles into two parts. “We would have liked a better European Championship.” And: “A new era began in September.”
The 2-0 defeat by England in the last 16 of the pan-European tournament at the end of June 2021 put an end to the 15 years of national coach Joachim Löw, and Hansi Flick (56) took over. Since then, the DFB team has won seven games and scored 31:2 goals. With the exception of the 1:2 defeat against North Macedonia at the end of March, the team has thus secured a place in the 2022 World Cup.
As with his extremely successful stint at FC Bayern, when he collected seven titles in a year and a half, football coach Flick is banking on the fun factor, team spirit and intra-team harmony, as well as attacking, bold, brash football. “The team played with joy and fun,” he stressed after the 4-1 win in Erewan. “The team wants to. “
We even have top players in some positions.
This mindset of the players is palpable under the new head coach. Where previously they had seemed rather inhibited overall since the abortive 2018 World Cup, they are now setting off in a liberated manner and exuding a zest for the game. Leroy Sané, who has been moved from the right to the left wing and now has every freedom to run cross-country, represents this liberation, as does Jonas Hofmann, whom Flick converted into a right-back with every offensive orientation. “We have enormous quality in every position,” says Flick, “in every position” he sees “two, three players we were desperately looking for before”. He names the U-21 European champions Karim Adeyemi and Lukas Nmecha for the attack and adds: “In some positions we even have top players. “
Flick: “We are back “
When making this assessment, Flick is referring to the 2020 and 2021 Champions League finals. “There were many many German players on the pitch there,” he says, there were ten in total: Neuer, Süle, Goretzka, Kimmich, Gnabry, Müller for FC Bayern 2020 in their 1-0 win over Paris; 2021 Rüdiger, Havertz and Werner on behalf of Chelsea FC, who won the Henkel Cup with a 1-0 win over Manchester City and Ilkay Gündogan in the team “We don’t need to hide,” Flick rightly concludes, finding the quality of his chosen players “good” even in this quantity and summarising in retrospect and outlook: “The games have shown that we are back. I do believe that the team can still improve against stronger opponents.”
They will have to fulfil this condition. Because the challengers in the qualifying group are “not among the best in Europe and the world “, as Flick, Müller and Marco Reus admitted realistically. They were grateful sparring partners who boosted self-confidence and lightened the mood within the team in the still opaque start phase under Flick. “Everyone likes being a national player and likes being part of the team,” said the national coach, praising the “family atmosphere” that he knows “so well from the national team”.
Test matches in March: England and South Africa under discussion
For all the enthusiasm about the first steps “on the right path”, Flick also sees the deficits. He sometimes misses the precision going forward, the positioning has to be improved, as well as the defensive cooperation, where, for example, he admonishes a permanently existing residual defence with a DFB man outnumbered.
After the successful warm-up, the first intermediate test against stronger opponents is to be passed in March; England and South Africa are being discussed as tasks, possibly Greece. This will be followed in May/June by four games in the Nations League – and at the end of the year by the World Cup. And at the latest at this tournament, the world’s best teams will be waiting.