Dhe game was already lost, the second minute of stoppage time was on. On the sidelines, the numbers 1 and 4 shone green on the board of the fourth official. The substitution of Jamal Musiala for Thomas Müller will go down in the German football chronicle as the last official act of national coach Joachim Loew.
Sometimes the last moments define everything that has been before, that they provide the vanishing point from which the prehistory is interpreted. It wasn’t quite like that on Tuesday evening at London’s Wembley Stadium, for that the scene was too insignificant in the context of the big picture, too small, but it was a good starting point for looking back and forth. One could see symbolically what the last three years, Löw’s late work, stand for in the context of his oeuvre: for the inability to create something new – also because the old kept getting in the way. And sometimes Löw himself.
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