Dr. StrangeLöw or: How I learned to stop worrying and love Deutschland
Best hair of the tournament? I say yes.
Every few years, thirty thousand sweaty, fat, drunk, sunburned England fans love to remind their Teutonic counterparts that there were ten German bombers in the air, but that the RAF from England shot them all down. Sadly, MI6 neglected to inform the RAF that the Luftwaffe brought their jet-engined Messerschmitt Me 262s to play on Sunday in Bloemfontein.
As I’ve mentioned before, The Sinister German Menace will always find a way to beat you. The Americans found this out the hard way in 2002 by outplaying The Hun Bastards in the quarterfinals and losing 1-0 after having a goalbound shot cruelly deflected by the arm of Torsten Frings. You don’t truly become a footballing nation until you outplay Germany in a major competition and lose anyway; that loss put the Yankee Soccerball Squadron on the map more than their 3-2 defeat of heavily fancied Portugal or their glorious dismissal of Mexico in the second round of that tournament.
Some observations from Sunday:
-For much of the first half the English were static in attack. This is one of the cardinal sins of soccer because it makes the opposing side’s job very easy. Soccer is a game of mistakes; if either side play mistake-free defense they simply will not concede. It’s almost tautological. The way to unlock an organized defense is for attacking players to have the energy and positional awareness to be moving around continuously, stretching and deforming the opposing side’s defensive formation until a weakness appears. This is what the pundits call “creating space”. For most of the first half it seemed like England just couldn’t be arsed.
-Being lazy in attack also poses problems for your defense because scoring a goal with lazy players requires more of them going forward than you would otherwise need, leaving you vulnerable to be caught on the break. In a weird way, England were caught out for the first German goal. England’s entire back four were further up the field than they should have been given:
a. Manuel Neuer’s ability to distribute the ball;
b. that the Jabulani ball seems to travel farther than other balls; and
c. that the German forwards could not be flagged for offside on a goal kick.
England’s second cardinal sin of soccer was letting Neuer’s goal kick bounce. You must always get your head to a flighted goal kick; John Terry and Matt Upson left it to each other and Confused Polack Miroslav Klose was off to the races with predictable results. It’s the kind of goal a team of twelve year olds would be embarrassed to concede; no wonder England’s goalkeeper/male model/writer/all-around Renaissance Man David James was so furious.
-The second goal demonstrated how simple a game soccer is when it’s played properly. After giving the ball away cheaply in the 32nd minute, England did not get a sniff of it again until it was in the back of their net. Upson hoofed it downfield rather than doing anythng creative and eighteen seconds, seven quick passes, and a good run by The Impostor in the Gerd Müller Shirt later it was 2-0 courtesy of the other Confused Polack, Lukas Podolski. The Germans had threatened to do it two minutes earlier after a clever one-two pass between Muller and Confused Tunisian Sami Khedira left Upson and Gareth Barry for dead; at this point there was blood in the water and England were lucky to find themselves down only two goals.
-Despite the score being 2-0 to Poland after half an hour, I wasn’t overly worried. England had played like garbage but had shown flashes of intelligence and had plenty of time to get back into it. Besides, the defensive duo of Per Mertesacker and Arne Friedrich was not, is not, and will not be convincing at international level. England’s opener was only a matter of time: five minutes to be precise.
You could tell that the Germans were a bit flustered after that and the equalizer seemed to be on the cards well before halftime. Not that I care enough to do this, but if I did I would go to my grave insisting that England would have been more likely to win the game than Germany had the referee and linesmen managed to see what the other 40,000 people in the stadium saw when Fat Frank Lampard’s shot bounced a full yard over the goal line.
And now, a tangent. Of course there’s a delicious irony to the nature of Lampard’s ghost goal given its eerie similarity to Geoff Hurst’s second goal against West Germany in the 1966 World Cup Final. However, anyone who claims that this non-goal somehow represents karmic justice for what transpired at Wembley all those years ago is foolish, because to do so requires an argument from the premise that Hurst’s goal was illegitimate. That premise is untenable, and here’s why:
No one will ever know whether Hurst’s goal crossed the line. Roger Hunt was convinced enough that he turned away in celebration rather than put the ball in the net, which he could have done easily. Maybe the ball never did cross the line; I read sometime ago that some German computer scientist modeled the flight of the ball as shown on television and “proved” it never went across the line. Seeing as the television coverage itself is a model of actual events and does not conclusively demonstrate whether or not the ball crossed the line, one cannot then reach a definitive conclusion using a model of that model. It violates Information Theory 101.
In any case, if Ze Germans and their sympathizers see fit to question the referee’s decision on that goal, it is only fair that we also question why Karl-Heinz Schnellinger was allowed to handle the ball on Germany’s last minute equalizer. If the referee saw that offense, Hurst’s goal never would have happened because the match would have finished 2-1 in normal time to England. Quod erat demonstrandum.
-At the start of the second half the English had plenty of time to equalize, but in typical fashion they politely allowed their opponents to blitz down the wing and score twice to put the game beyond doubt. Just like 1986, when Terry Butcher could have poleaxed Diego Maradona (who would have deserved it) but instead courteously let him score the greatest individual goal in the history of the World Cup, England twice were good sports and got punished for it.
Had imitation footballer Glen Johnson not got a stupid yellow card in the first half he could have fouled The Most German-looking Person in the World, Bastian Schweinsteiger (translated loosely as “pig rapist”), and prevented the third goal. Similarly, Gareth Barry (who was at fault for the third German goal) could have hacked down Confused Turk Mesut Özil and prevented the fourth goal.
Ultimately, England got what they deserved for playing poorly in the group stage of the tournament. They lacked pace, patience, posession, positional awareness, and teamwork, and played tactics which insulted the quality and intelligence of their oppostion. As a result, they were dead lucky to scrape by in a group they should have won at a canter, found themselves on the wrong side of the bracket and were cruelly exposed by a younger, less experienced, less individually talented German side. Good riddance to England; the final whistle was catharsis for an entire nation.
More than any other character in literature, I identify with Meursault (let the amateur psychoanalysis commence!) but as that horrendous match wore on I began to understand the torments of Winston Smith at the hands of the vicious inquisitor O’Brien. Ze Germans were playing the way soccer should be played; Özil, Khedira, and the Pig Rapist were irresistible and even the comically mediocre Klose and Müller looked like geniuses compared to England.
What then is the point of resistance? It is, of course, futile. There was only ever going to be one result, ghost goal or not, so if we can’t land that plane we might as well crash it. As the clock counted up to ninety and England were deservedly put to the sword, I could feel the Bavarian DNA from my maternal great-grandmother wash over every cell in my body like the Panzer Divisions plowing through the Maginot Line at Maubeuge. This time there was no RAF to put up a fight, no Winston Churchill plagiarizing Teddy Roosevelt to conjure up blood, toil, tears, and sweat, and no cameo appearance by the Americans to win the day.
But it’s all right, everything is alright. This England fan’s struggle is (mercifully) finished, as I have won victory over myself. I heart Deutschland.
¡Vamos Alemania, que se ganen contra los putos Albicelestes!
