Lesson number one: employing a young and inexperienced coach who just happens to have been a brilliant striker sometime in the not-so-remote past, is a gamble which might pay off and then again it mightn’t. He’ll want the team to play positive, attacking football; he’ll want to bring in a whole lot of young nobodies, from abroad, if necessary; he’ll adopt American nutritional and physiological training methods – because that’s where he lives, in sunny California, with his American wife and the children. He’ll keep flying in and out of Germany for every friendly ahead of the main training camp or the tournament itself – and he won’t even listen to Franz Beckenbauer when it comes to that! As a matter of fact, Jürgen has this tendency of not listening to anybody, whether busybodies or bigwigs; he concentrates on his own thing. And the only thing which saves him from being guillotine or being sent to the gallows is that he does his thing well: look at the German team, look what it did in the World Cup and HOW they did it.

Still, nobody should bet that Klinsi won’t take up the assignment of coaching the Americans, if rumours in that regard be true. It would be nearer ‘home’.

A football lesson

‘Klinsi’, Klinsmann had his Midas touch when he set up Miroslav Klose and Lukas Podolski as the attacking pair. Bastian Schweinsteiger’s role might have remained a bit undefined – why did he get worn out sooner than the others? Klinsmann might also have overlooked Philipp Lahm’s possibilities, who was playing something very akin to a Franck Ribery to Michael Ballack’s mortal version of the divine Zinedine Zidane. Lastly, this website had declared David Odonkor to be Klinsmann’s ‘secret weapon’ long before the tournament: why did Klinsi make such sparing use of this ‘blitz’, whose speed with the ball, for example on the right, has been a visible unnerving factor for more than one opponent?

The Germans lost to the Italians because they failed to score, the only question being: why did they fail to score? Because this team is not the final product of Klinsmann’s efforts – it could never be – but merely a beginning, and a grand one at that. Klinsmann himself might have done it for the sake of motivation, declaring that nothing short of the title could be the aim, especially when Germany was playing the World Cup on home ground. Maybe Klinsi was hoping that that would keep this young team going for a couple of hundred meters more, for a couple more games. They took him at his word and fought and and thundered and blundered right through to the semi-finals – before finding out that the boots were still a size too large for them. There’s absolutely no shame in that, but there’s danger in not acknowledging that even a Jürgen Klinsmann cannot present Germany with a full-fledged team ripe for the championship. It wouldn’t be good if he could. These things have to grow: the European championship in two years’ time, the South African World Cup in four.

No other team is better prepared for the World Cup in 2010 than the German team of 2006!

Jürgen, too, has to learn: from Italy coach Marcello Lippi, for example, who didn’t hesitate to substitute two midfielders and have four strikers up front simply for the sake of producing a result. He didn’t want to see Italy going into penalty shooting – so he used some risky, but effective medicine against it. France coach Raymond Domenech had refused to do just that, even if Zizou himself was pleading for it: put Thierry Henry and David Trezeguet up front. What saved Domenech was the rise of shooting star Franck Ribery, who started combining with Henry and Zidane so well that – well, the Portuguese will be finding out tonight!

Brazil coach Carlos Alberto Parreira made just one mistake: he wouldn’t let Ronaldo and Robinho play together – nor would he think of retiring Cafu and Roberto Carlos before their expiry date.

Bettering the world

As regards the German psyche, it is good that the Germans have discovered “a new sense of national pride”, as German President Horst Köhler himself has been at pains to point out. But this national pride should include the “world as guests visiting friends”, which is the true translation of the German motto for this World Cup. Then there are those ‘foreigners’ in Germany’s increasingly multi-ethnic society – or multi-ethnic football team, for that matter! They too should be not just the beneficiaries, but participants in this national pride.

The point to note is that this national pride is not a revival from the past, but a completely new thing – a product of the new Germany, a reflection of its psyche.

This is how Le Parisien newspaper commented the popularity of the French team in their country:

“Their secret? Talent, character and above all men… who embody France in its mosaic of cultures, origins and religions.”

It is a strange world: two teenagers were shot dead in central Somalia by Islamic militia fighters for watching the ‘banned’ semi-final match between Germany and Italy.

And there will be a party at Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate on Friday under the motto: “Football for a Better World – From Germany to South Africa.”

Lessons of a World Cup.