Thomas Müller can physically feel the beginning of a football year in which a major country tournament is coming up. “It’s tingling a bit,” reported the Munich national player, whose numerous tingling experiences have long since given him the status of an old international. As a guest of the daily media event of the DFB before the international test match against Israel on Saturday (8.45 p.m., in Sinsheim), Müller now told in the proven detailed Müller manner about his diverse tournament experiences since the debut World Cup in 2010 in South Africa.
He admitted a serious mistake: his optimistic forecast for the success of the national team at the 2018 World Cup in Russia (“There’s a team on the field that can tear something.”) did not even slightly agree with the result. He says he can only “remember a few players who stood out from this poor team performance”.
Thomas Müller explicitly does not count himself among the few positive exceptions, but if he had to name a name, he would probably have thought of Julian Brandt. While Müller left Russia almost four years ago with a battered reputation, Brandt, then just under 22, was a player who gave hope for better times.
Four years later, however, things are very different again: Müller, from the position of senior boss, is discussing the expectations of the World Cup tournament in Qatar in November, and Julian Brandt only gets into the team quarters on the outskirts of Frankfurt through a kind of loophole. Coach Hansi Flick only added him to the guest list afterwards – as Borussia Dortmund’s first and only current participant – after the team doctors had sent Serge Gnabry (FC Bayern) home with a flu infection.
The reactions from the other players were benevolent, but mixed.
Apart from the national coach appointed by the DFB, not many of his 80 million unofficial colleagues in this country would have thought of BVB midfielder Brandt. And for the very reasons that defense attorney Matthias Ginter brought up when he was asked to comment on Brandt’s post-nomination. “He’s a very, very talented player,” said Ginter, before expressing his hope “that he’ll get his qualities, which are beyond question, on the pitch.”
No Marcel Reif-Ranicki and Loddarmadäus could have put it better than the Mönchengladbach defender. Ginter’s assessment of Brandt evoked sympathy and recognition, but also regret at having to describe a colleague who will soon be 26 as “talent” who rarely shows what he can do. Or, as recently with Dortmund, only gets the opportunity as a substitute.
At the team hotel on Wednesday, Brandt met a teammate who elicited similarly mixed reactions: Julian Draxler, 28, is also not said to have gotten the most out of his talent and career – from a sporting point of view. So the two Julians are united by two things these days: the reputation as an unfulfilled promise – and the prospect of one last chance to recommend themselves for the national team’s current course for inclusion in the World Cup squad.
The hard-working national coach Flick has not only phoned a lot of people in the past few weeks (including Brandt to tell him that he has to stay at home this time because Draxler is preferred), he has also undertaken a number of educational trips. One of those tours took him to Madrid for the Champions League game, where he witnessed the demise of Paris St Germain at Real.
Draxler, a PSG pro for more than five years, also played – he came on in the 88th minute when a headless Parisian eleven was already 1:3 behind. Flick shrugs his shoulders as if in apology when he describes Draxler’s role in this very special sports club: “He comes a few minutes before the end and should then step in somewhere, possibly on the right back.” And once Draxler has possession of the ball, the task is not necessarily to start the best with the ball – but to deliver it quickly to Neymar, Messi or Mbappé.
Draxler chose the career problem himself when he countersigned the next contract in Paris last summer. Despite a long injury, he took part in 18 of 29 league games and four of seven European Cup games with PSG this season. But the statistical picture is deceptive: Often he only got a handful of minutes of action. And yet, to paraphrase Ginter: Draxler’s qualities are unquestionable. At the time of Mesut Özil, Philipp Lahm and Bastian Schweinsteiger, Jogi Löw declared that he had no better footballing player in the squad than Julian Draxler. Flick at least sees it similarly these days after he was able to watch the 28-year-old in training again. Draxler is one of those players whose special skills are immediately apparent.
A national team that is driven on the offensive by regular players Brandt and Draxler is probably not to be expected at the World Cup in Qatar. But Flick and his team of coaches look less at the deployment times of the players in their clubs than at giving the squad a repertoire for all situations. It’s not too late for anyone, especially not for footballers as blessed as Julian Brandt and Julian Draxler.