National team squad: Terodde is on Flick’s list of applicants – Sport

When Jürgen Klinsmann invited the national players with their wives and girlfriends to a holiday together in a luxury hotel in Sardinia before the 2006 World Cup, there was a perfidious plan behind it. As promised, there was free time and for common amusements, but in the morning the imported American fitness experts asked for circuit training.

National coach Hansi Flick is now reviving this concept when he receives his squad of players next Monday to prepare for the four Nations League games scheduled for June at the “Marbella Football Center” in southern Spain. Wives and girlfriends are also welcome, and a few have already signed up for the nearly five-day trip, but work will be more of a priority than leisure. The afternoon is reserved for “relaxing and unwinding”, as Flick puts it, while training with a focus on positional play is the order of the day in the morning. This is a “serious and professional” solution to get in the mood for the June program, which will be challenging for the busy professionals. After the days in Marbella there is a free weekend, then the preparations continue in Herzogenaurach.

Unlike Klinsmann, the national coach expressed his priorities right from the start, but with the exception of reserve goalkeeper Marc-André ter Stegen, nobody submitted a vacation request. As Flick indicated on Thursday, those who were not called to work in the first place are to be pitied instead. The DFB head coach did not want to deny the term “hardship cases”: “Everyone I had to turn down would have liked to have been there,” he said. Unlike his predecessor, Jogi Löw, Flick tries to communicate his decisions to those he no longer invites. This time players like Matthias Ginter, Christian Günter, Robin Gosens and Florian Neuhaus were addressed. Flick found ambiguous words of comfort about defender Ginter, a regular player under Jogi Löw: He finds his move from Mönchengladbach to Freiburg “exciting: Christian Streich is a coach who makes players better, and Matze can benefit from that.” Julian Draxler, who was back in the squad in March, is missing due to injury.

The FC Bayern-heavy squad, which he nominated for the encounters with Italy (twice), England and Hungary, is “the standard of all things,” said Flick. However, he does not want this to be understood as a determination that the selection for the World Cup in Qatar is by no means over, emphasized the national coach. Flick even keeps a place on the list of applicants for the 34-year-old Bundesliga promoted Simon Terodde: “If he performs at a top level in the first division and scores his goals, then all doors and gates are open.” First of all, Terodde can recover from the promotion parties with Schalke 04, which lasted several days.