Toni Kroos’ DFB comeback will be a acid test for the national coach: he will have to build a new midfield – and moderate new power relationships. Toni Kroos can tell him how dangerous that can be.
Sandro Wagner narrowly missed out on this experience. They had already put up a poster of him in the Rungg sports zone in beautiful Eppan in South Tyrol, his larger-than-life photo hung on a fence in front of the training ground, stylishly in black and white. However, in the end Wagner didn’t make it into the squad that national coach Jogi Löw took with him to the training camp before the 2018 World Cup, but Nils Petersen was there, whose photo was nowhere to be seen. Maybe people should have been suspicious back then, maybe the wrong picture was already a sign. Today we know that the reasons for the impressive failure at the tournament in Russia were already rooted in this training camp, and not just because Jogi Löw once called the new striker “Nils Pettersson”.