Bierhoff: “We have total trust”
Voss-Tecklenburg and her team got through the first two years of Corona with a lot of success against opponents who were rarely really demanding. Weakened in terms of personnel, there was then a 1-1 draw against Spain and defeats against Canada and England at the European Championship preparation tournament in England in February – and most recently the unexpected 2-3 in Serbia in the World Cup qualifier.
“It’s a very young team that has left a few questions unanswered with one or the other result,” says DFB director Oliver Bierhoff, who is also responsible for the women. “But we have total confidence and know that Germany wants to play an important role in this tournament as well.” He also knows “that Martina and her team are extremely meticulous about it.”
Voss-Tecklenburg completed three training camps in preparation with the record European champions. She wants to play “offensive and dynamic football”. But of course she also knows: “We have to get through the group phase first.” The times when the DFB women won titles in series are long gone.
“Martina is refreshingly uninhibited”
Voss-Tecklenburg’s contract with the DFB runs until the 2023 World Cup in Australia and New Zealand. An extremely checkered history connects her with the association: as a player she was European champion four times, and in 1995 she was also runner-up in the world championship. The fact that she returned to the national team after the birth of her daughter Dina was anything but a matter of course at the time. Since March, Voss-Tecklenburg has even been the proud grandmother of a girl.
The national coach sits on the supervisory board of Fortuna Düsseldorf and lives with her husband in Straelen on the Lower Rhine. Hermann Tecklenburg has already revealed in the “Bunte” that it was his wife, who was 20 years his junior, who once proposed to him: “Martina is refreshingly uninhibited. She is not so old-fashioned as to wait for the man to propose .”
Her career as an international player came to an abrupt end before the 2000 Olympic Games in Sydney. Because of a dispute with her then partner and teammate Inka Grings, Voss was kicked out of national coach Tina Theune-Meyer’s squad. Later she got a farewell game from the association. And much later she said in a “Spiegel” interview: “Today I know that I will never live with a woman again. I like men.”