When Hansi Flick went to work in the summer, Germany was just a former football superpower. The so-called team was eliminated in the round of 16 in a terrifyingly insignificant way during the European Championship and was not missed by anyone afterwards, because the Danes, Italians, Belgians and Spaniards, among others, played much more excitingly. At that time, the representation of the DFB in the current World Cup qualification ranked third behind Armenia and North Macedonia, in the Fifa world rankings you had to feel your way down for a long time to find the four-time world champion, first came countries like the USA and Switzerland and Colombia. Sweden moved threateningly closer to the Germans, who had dropped to 16th place.
These facts expressed the state of health of the national team last summer, only then did many compatriots understand that the accident during the 2018 World Cup was not an accident at all, but the characteristic of a crisis-ridden downward trend with a worrying tendency to escalate like the 0: 6 in Spain . When Flick started work, this fashionable slogan could be heard everywhere, with which those responsible are put under pressure to succeed: The new national coach will have to “deliver” as quickly as possible – and that’s exactly what he did.
Since Monday evening, the DFB has been the first association that World Cup host Qatar has put on the guest list. The responsible director Oliver Bierhoff is now allowed to pursue his favorite task and plan a tournament camp with the associated slogan. Maybe a tent camp in the desert, with an oasis and date palms? “Operation Sandstorm”?
In an unspectacular way, Hansi Flick got off to a flawless start
Nobody needs to point out to Flick that the successes in the particularly lightweight qualification group J are at best relative meaningfulness, but one is already a little wiser. Some skeptics had suspected that the new national coach could be a younger version of his predecessor, after all, the two had worked together long enough. There were calls for a reformer without a DFB past like Ralf Rangnick, but for the time being there is no longer any talk.
Not only because of the five victories in a row Flick got off to a flawless start in his unspectacular way, similar to after joining FC Bayern two years ago, when he discovered to his amazement that his coaching certificate and his convictions as a football teacher were also for the care of a top team with the highest demands could be good. At that time he first had to learn, this time he had the inner certainty from the start that he was in the right place at the right time.
Flick believably gives the impression that he regards the post of national coach as both an honorable calling and a maximum of personal pleasure. His instinct for the psychology of this sport gives him an astonishing influence when dealing with the players. His pragmatism comes from football life rather than from a football textbook. Could Flick keep up with the infamous laptop trainers in his essay on systems theories? He knows: he doesn’t have to. In terms of rhetoric, he occasionally tends to say something about the calendar, for example: “We don’t just play with each other, but for each other!” Sometimes he sounds like a preschool master. But why not when the message gets through?