For some thoughts on the above that just didn’t really fit well in this piece, click here.
The parallels are easy and obvious. Germany lost their opening game of the 2022 World Cup, as they did in 2018, and now look fairly likely to exit the tournament at the group stage, as they did in 2018.
Things aren’t quite that simple, though. It is too easy to say Germany were distracted by a focus on the conversations surrounding the host nation, human rights, migrant workers, the LGBTQ+ community, equality for women. But to say that suggests Germany were poor from the get-go against Japan when, in reality, they were pretty impressive for around 70 minutes.
This really did not look like 2018. Germany created more xG against Japan (3.2) than in the opening two games of the last World Cup. No team — including Spain, who scored seven, or England, who scored six — had more shots on target than Germany in their opening game (Brazil are yet to play at the time of writing).
As Grace Robertson pointed out, Germany were more likely to score five times than just once from the shots they took against Japan.
It was partly just ‘one of those days’ and it was partly a failure from Flick as he refused to react to the shift in momentum. Japan did just that, changing shape to a back five to deal with the space David Raum had been finding before getting on the front foot with aggressive like-for-like changes.
Then Germany struggled, they faltered, but ordinarily they would have already been two or three goals up and none of it would have mattered. But they didn’t score, so it does matter, and I honestly think this is it for Germany’s World Cup hopes already.
But this is still not like 2018. This team and this squad is not in a situation anything like 2018, when Jogi Löw’s ideas had gone stale as he refused to transition from the 2014 World Cup winning side quickly enough.
The performances in 2018 were dreadful. Wednesday’s wasn’t. But a World Cup group stage, three games long, is basically a knockout competition from the off. There is non time to recover from ‘one of those days’ in front of goal against Japan when you also share the group with Costa Rica.
As Flick put it, the Japan game was Germany’s “free hit” and now they cannot afford anything less than perfection in their two remaining games.
That sounds like 2018 but Flick may now be served looking back further, to Germany’s 2014 World Cup winning campaign, for some inspiration.
Back then, Löw kicked off with Philipp Lahm in midfield but gave the idea up at the quarter-final stage, putting the captain back in his more traditional right-back role to provide the team with better balance. The question now is if Flick does the same with Joshua Kimmich.
This previously seemed unlikely but Germany just do not have a high quality right-back, making way with centre-half Niklas Süle or the versatile but average Thilo Kehrer. Lukas Klostermann, another option, is something between those two.
But Kimmich can play right-back as well as pretty much anyone else on the planet and Germany have options there — Leon Goretzka only featured from the bench against Japan after İlkay Gündoğan was chosen to start. Flick himself used Kimmich at right-back, in for the injured Benjamin Pavard, as Bayern Munich won the Champions League in 2020.
Flick said German journalists “can assume that [the coaching team] discuss all options in every position,” when asked on Thursday whether Kimmich could line up at the back.
You can’t sign new players in international football and sometimes players just have to be moved around to find a proper balance, and to get all of your best players on the pitch at the same time. If there’s a way (and there is) to play Kimmich, Goretzka and Gündoğan without dropping anybody nearly as talented, now is the time to do it.
Right now, the comparisons to 2018 and talk of political distractions are the buzz, the narrative of distraction is already written. And I do think Germany will now fall short and head home early. But it isn’t outlandish to suggest they can give Spain a real test. If they pull that off with Kimmich in defence suddenly this World Cup campaign will look a lot like 2014’s success rather than 2018’s disaster.