In a surprisingly one-sided affair this afternoon, Germany knocked out highly touted Argentina 4-0. Argentina’s world-class attackers looked ordinary, at best, and their back-line positively amateur while Germany put on a footballing clinic for their rivals, dominating play in the midfield and getting forward beautifully. The great Maradona, perhaps the world’s greatest ever player, was comprehensively out-coached by Joachim Low, whose modest playing career rarely took him higher than Germany’s second division.
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The pundits will spend hours dissecting what went wrong with Maradonna’s Argentina so I’ll leave them to it except to highlight his decision to leave Diego Milito, the striker whose goals propelled Internazionale to Champions League glory, unused on the bench for the entire match. The game cried out for his physicality and direct style as little Tevez, Higuain, Di Maria and even Messi were repelled time and again by the German defenders.(Perhaps an even bigger mistake was Maradona’s baffling decision to exclude Milito’s teammates Javier Zanetti, Inter’s 37 year old captain, and the midfielder Esteban Cambiasso from the squad completely. Zanetti, who plays like a man ten years younger, would have been the perfect solution to the problem right-back spot where, first, Jonas and, then, Otamendi failed so miserably while Cambiasso is a one-man engine room, keeping possession and distributing the ball to the forwards with ease.) Anyway, my apologies to Herrs Mertesacker and Friedrich, the German center-backs whose speed and international credentials I questioned in my preview. They were superb. Even better was their midfield shield, Sami Khedira. ‘Keeper Neuer was never forced to make anything other than the most comfortable of saves.
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Germany opened their account early in the third minute when Mueller headed home from Schweinsteiger’s free kick with Argentina’s defense asleep. They never looked back although it was not until the sixty-seventh that they added one for insurance. Good work from Mueller who, despite being on the ground, managed to play Podolski free into the box where the Polish-born striker’s low cross was finished with ease by another German with Polish blood, Miroslav Klose. Much has been made of the new multi-ethnic flavor of this year’s German squad. Beside the Poles—a third is the diminutive midfielder Trochowski, who made a late appearance today—the Germans boast players of Turkish, Tunisian, Bosnian, Spanish, Nigerian and Ghanaian descent plus a naturalized Brazilian to boot. But their style of play—efficient, incisive, controlling the entire field of play—seems relatively unchanged from their more blond-haired, blue-eyed predecessors.
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Then, minutes after Germany’s second, Schweinsteiger breezily sauntered into the box past almost the entire Argentine defense before laying it off to Friedrich for a finish that was perhaps even easier than Klose’s. 3-0. Finally, just before the death, a 4-on-2 counter-attack resulted in another Klose tap-in. Germany have now scored four goals in two consecutive games. With his two today, Klose moves past Pele and French legend Just Fontaine on the all-time World Cup scoring-chart, drawing level with Gerd Mueller, the German striker known as der Bomber, and just one behind Ronaldo, the Brazilian who holds the record at 15. The next closest active player is David Villa on seven. The two strikers seem likely to meet in the semi-final though Paraguay still stand in Spain’s way. Kick-off in twenty minutes.
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You’re Getting Old Moment: At 21, I am one year older than goal-scorer Thomas Mueller and midfielder Toni Kroos, level with starters Mesut Oezil and Jerome Boateng, reserves Holger Badstuber and Marko Marin and Argentinian substitute Javier Pastore. I trail Lionel Messi, generally regarded as the world’s best player, by just two years . Time to get moving.