Coach with absurd interview
After this fiasco, Flick no longer has any arguments
A comment from Tobias Nordmann
September 9, 2023, 11:29 p.m
Everything should be better against Japan. After the World Cup fiasco and a weak first half of the year, national coach Hansi Flick wanted to turn things around and make German football successful again. But the opposite happens. This cannot remain without consequences.
There has to be a plan B. Hansi Flick has no future as a national coach. The German national team wants to do everything better in the friendly against Japan, to make amends for everything that has gone shockingly wrong in the past few months, at least since the failed World Cup in Qatar. But this mission fails miserably and sinks into the Mittelland Canal in Wolfsburg late on Saturday evening. The World Cup revenge against Japan was lost 1:4 (!). This is a debacle. Or more. Captain İlkay Gündoğan even admits that they no longer play on equal terms with teams like those from Japan. A madness.
Things get even more crazy when Flick himself appears for an interview on RTL. “I think we’re doing well and I’m the right coach,” he said with plenty of defiance in his voice. “But I know that there is a lot of dynamism in professional football. I can’t foresee what else will happen.” Flick admitted to being “brutally disappointed”. And then he said things that sounded like pure self-dismissal. “We currently don’t have the means to outplay such a compact defense. It was simply not enough,” he said, criticizing the training in German football. “The Japanese are all well trained and have the basics down pat. We in German football have to wake up and work on things,” he said and then said with plenty of defiance: “We’ll prepare well for France again. We’re having a great time We have to shake ourselves up and try to stand differently on the pitch. Blaming is of no use.”
Where’s the plan?
The German squad consists of players who play in major national and international clubs. Who compete with the best in the Champions League. But when these footballers come together to represent the DFB team, everything falls apart. This is not conviction, not courage. And no plan. The national coach is responsible for that. And seems increasingly perplexed. He justified the wasted first half of 2023 with necessary experiments. It has to be said so harshly that they all went wrong. Findings? If so, then only negative ones. This should now be over. Now the team should prepare for the home European Championship in 2024.
And what does Flick do? He’s back to experimenting. Joshua Kimmich is moved from the center and moved to the right side of defense. However, he should move to the middle when he has possession of the ball. Like John Stones does at Manchester City. A successful idea from star coach Josep Guardiola. However, he has the advantage that he can practice this complex tactical variant over weeks and months in training, Flick doesn’t have the time and tries it anyway. What he also tries to do: implement Nico Schlotterbeck on the left side of the back four. But the Dortmund player goes down without a sound in an unfamiliar position. As at the World Cup in Qatar, he is one of the protagonists of the debacle.
And in the center, where Kimmich is no longer there, where Goretzka wasn’t even nominated, and Gündoğan is finally supposed to look as great as he once did at Man City, nothing happened. The new captain couldn’t provide any impetus and his defensive security Emre Can was everything but the stabilizer he was hoping for. There is currently nowhere in the team. Plans are not apparent. All that is clear is that they fail. Hansi Flick wanted constant “activity and intensity”, a team in constant motion, with their heads always on. None of that happened. What’s going on there? It seems as if the coach no longer speaks the language of his players. That is fatal. That’s the break. The national coach no longer has any arguments.