New midfield in the DFB team?
Flick apparently makes Kimmich a “fringe figure”
September 7, 2023, 4:54 p.m
Joshua Kimmich sees himself as a central figure in the midfield of the German national football team. National coach Hansi Flick apparently has other plans for these positions – and is considering a new position for the Bayern star. This is shown by findings from an actually secret test game.
Hansi Flick is playing hide and seek again. In his groundbreaking week of probation as national coach, the 58-year-old only provides very sparse insights into his plans for the tricky international matches this Saturday (8.45 p.m./RTL and in the live ticker at ntv.de) in Wolfsburg against Japan and then against France, in which he and the national soccer team have to bring about a change in the mood in the European Championship host country.
Nobody was allowed to observe the standard training on Thursday. And the day before, no observers were allowed on the grounds of VfL Wolfsburg during the 5-0 win in the internal test against the U20 team of the DFB. And yet Flick’s explosive business game with his previous midfield boss and captain Joshua Kimmich made it to the outside via “Bild”.
There are some indications that the 28-year-old Kimmich, who sees and sees himself as the main character at the center of the German game, has to go back to the right again – i.e. to the edge of the field. There, where his DFB career once began as the successor to Philipp Lahm. Where he had to help out at the last European Championship in 2021, albeit very reluctantly.
In today’s football, being moved from the six no longer has to be a demotion. Tactics nerds have looked at Brighton and Hove Albion in the Premier League, where the full-backs rotate into the build-up when in possession of the ball, creating a kind of roundabout. Manchester City plays the incoming right-back with John Stones, Liverpool FC with Trent Alexander-Arnold. Kimmich could be an important stop sign and still deliver his beloved chip balls as a liaison. This is a tactical invention by Pep Guardiola, but it requires a lot of training and automatism, which is rather difficult with a national team.
The time of Kimmich and Goretzka is over for now
However, Kimmich, who would like to be the boss so much, has always named the headquarters as his favorite position. He should perceive a shift back to the right as a gradation. Especially before the big six-man debate this summer at FC Bayern, where coach Tuchel really wanted to have a so-called “holding six”: a purely defensive-minded player who delivers the ball to the eight after winning the ball without any creative ambitions. “We don’t have a defensive one Six that thinks more about protecting the back zone,” Tuchel argued.
Kimmich or Leon Goretzka, who is currently being sorted out by Flick, followed the six-man debate closely – and were noticeably irritated. “I’m a six,” said Kimmich during FC Bayern’s Asia trip in the summer. It sounded more like: “I! Am! One! Six!” He fell after Thomas Tuchel publicly denied him belonging to the sub-species of sixes that the Bayern coach would like to incorporate into his game. The signing of Portugal international João Palhinha from Fulham fell through on the last day of the transfer period, to Tuchel’s displeasure, which became another major political issue in Munich.
A change of position in the national team would come at a bad time for Kimmich. It would not be conducive to his claim to leadership. Flick tends to appoint Dortmund’s Emre Can as his “holding six” and triple winner İlkay Gündoğan as the thinker and leader of the midfield game. For a few years, midfield was not only the common territory of Kimmich and Goretzka at Bayern, but also in the DFB team.
Generation Kimmich is still waiting for success with the DFB team
Flick has not yet confirmed the variant as fixed. He could also field Benjamin Henrichs at right-back. The 26-year-old has been filling the DFB problem position in Leipzig consistently well for some time. Of course, Flick would only ask Kimmich for something that he has just postulated as the top priority on the way to the home European Championship: “Every individual should and must put their ego behind and put themselves at the service of the team. The star is the team, not the individual.”
Flick has already forced Kimmich into full-back duty once: as Bayern coach during the Champions League triumph with FC Bayern in 2020. Since Benjamin Pavard was injured, Kimmich also had to help out on the right at the final tournament in Lisbon.
But is that the best EM solution now? After all, after the failed international experiments in March and June, Flick now wants to form “a core team”. And neither Flick nor Tuchel are shaking Kimmich’s status as a regular. That’s why he – alongside Flick – is at the center of the debates this week. He wanted to shape an era in the national team – so to speak, as class representative of the supposedly golden 1995 generation around Goretzka, Gnabry, Süle. So far, however, the Kimmich generation has stood for the 2018 and 2022 World Cup flops and the early end of the EM two years ago.
Kimmich from 2023 is a seasoned leader – even if, as can be seen in the World Cup documentation, he sometimes gets on his teammates’ nerves terribly. He also knows that Philipp Lahm’s willingness, as captain in 2014, to grudgingly give up the right-back from the quarter-finals, has become a chimney legend of the fourth World Cup title. Especially since the four-man chain seems unavoidable as a system: Flick quickly said goodbye to the three-man chain experiment after the terrible performances in the last international match window.