Julian Nagelsmann took over as national coach to make his football easier due to the lack of time before the European Championships. But he deviated from the path with a surprising experiment. That’s another reason why the defeat against Turkey showed that it’s complex.
The two stadium announcers said goodbye to the audience far too early because an important announcement would have been needed. A good 70,000 spectators left the interior of the Berlin Olympic Stadium believing that Germany had lost 3-2 to Turkey. Tens of thousands of Turkish fans therefore continued their celebration outside the walls without anyone informing them about the correction of the result.
Defeat against Türkiye – actually a draw
“There wasn’t a penalty, so I don’t count the goal“, Julian Nagelsmann ordered the score to be a draw. He would therefore remain undefeated as national coach, and the elite selection of the German Football Association (DFB) would remain without a home defeat against Turkey since 1951.
But it is not that simple. Nagelsmann will have to accept the documented result of 2:3, which resulted less from an actually controversial, although now common, decision by the referee.
Defensive problems remain as a legacy of the DFB team
The defeat resulted from problems that arose long before Nagelsmann and emerged both in the late phase under national coach Joachim Löw and in the entire phase under national coach Hansi Flick. On defense, the German team makes mistakes, some of which are hair-raising. If such mistakes happen in the first test game of a phase that the national coach wanted to use for intensive work on stable defense, they are analyzed more intensively.
Nagelsmann classified the mistakes that happened on Saturday (November 18th, 2023) on his nominal home debut into two categories. On the one hand, they were due to tactical misconduct, and on the other hand, some players had reached a poor “emotional level”. This vocabulary should now be part of the standard repertoire of football teachers, as the national coach emphatically introduced it in Berlin.
He could also have said that some players lacked the willingness to closely follow what was happening and draw the right conclusions from it, such as following an opponent if they appear alone in the German penalty area.
But that would have been too easy. As simple as Nagelsmann wanted to keep the German national team’s football when he took over at the end of September.
Nagelsmann throws his first intentions overboard
He threw these resolutions overboard against Turkey. The national coach must have been aware that it would be complex to use a player like Kai Havertz on the left side, who can also move into the back chain if necessary to take on the duties of a full-back.
Kai Havertz (r.) in a duel with Zeki Celik
It wasn’t just Havertz who had little time to approach the role in the few training sessions. The rest of the defensive line, in this case made up of Antonio Rüdiger, Jonathan Tah and Benjamin Henrichs, also has to adapt to the fact that a left link is usually missing. Henrichs, as the nominal right-back, must therefore move more into the center, Leroy Sané, as the right-wing offensive player, must dart forward and backwards in order to defend a space that is otherwise wide open.
Sané, who did this for a long time with great zeal and very respectably, was, however, too late a few times to compensate for the zeal of Henrichs, who wanted to have the ball in midfield before the score was 1-2, but didn’t get it and was therefore the size of a swimming pool left room for the strong Ferdi Kadıoğlu, who played the “offensive joker” for the Turks, as Nagelsmann described Havertz’s role.
Nagelsmann defends experiment with “world-class” Havertz
The national coach found the experiment a success despite the turbulence caused by the complex plan. He certified that Havertz was “world-class” and predicted that the professional… Arsenal FC could be one of the defining players in the new position at the European Championships in summer 2024.
This exuberance came as a surprise after an evening that, however, also brought more sobering insights than normal coordination problems when trying to try something new.
Gündoğan and Kimmich with us coordination problems downtown
The duo İlkay Gündoğan and Joshua Kimmich in the central midfield should be well-rehearsed and well trained tactically. But there, too, problems emerged in coordination and the willingness to carry out tasks in a disciplined manner. “It was good offensively“said Nagelsmann when asked whether he agreed with the record national player Lothar Matthäus that the Gündoğan/Kimmich combination as a so-called double six is not suitable.”Both are players who, by their profile, do not love playing on the second ball“, he added.
Gündoğan and Kimmich like having the one ball instead of chasing the lost one, just like everyone else who played on Saturday. That makes it a little more complex to achieve a stable defense.