Julian Nagelsmann tried a few new things in the friendly against Turkey. However, he stuck to the double center with Joshua Kimmich and Ilkay Gündogan. A mistake, says Lothar Matthäus, who would prefer to see the FC Bayern professional at the back on the right.
“I don’t know why they keep trying out Joshua Kimmich and Ilkay Gündogan together in central midfield,” Matthäus criticized Nagelsmann’s line-up in his “Sky” column, who, like his predecessor, apparently played the two professionals from FC Bayern and FC Barcelona viewed as an ideal solution.
But Matthäus believes: “They don’t fit together, we saw that at the World Cup last year.” You have to separate Gündogan and Kimmich “so that they don’t get in each other’s way,” explained the record national player, who emphasized that he didn’t mean it in a negative way at all.
Matthäus: Defense suffers from the double six Kimmich/Gündogan
“But when they play together, the internal relationship doesn’t fit. They take each other’s routes, they take the balls, they are too similar,” said the former professional, justifying his call for the duo to split up. “When they play together in the center, the defense doesn’t have the compactness that a coach wants.”
He simply doesn’t see a Kimmich/Gündogan double six, wrote Matthäus, whose solution calls for a different position for the Bayern star: “I want to keep both of them in the team, so there is only one option for me: Gündogan stays in the center and Kimmich goes To the right.”
Matthäus cannot explain why Julian Nagelsmann did not try out Kimmich on the right defensive side. “Perhaps Nagelsmann Kimmich is too slow as a right-back?” the record national player made a guess.
Of course, Kimmich is not a sprinter like Leroy Sané, “but Philipp Lahm also managed to play this position at the 2014 World Cup. Kimmich can do it too. He is a clever, good player and was one of the best four or five years ago right-wing defenders in the world,” wrote Matthäus.