There will be light – but please not so much. Julian Nagelsmann felt dazzled when he sat down on the press podium in Berlin’s Olympic Stadium on Friday evening. And despite his request to dim the lighting a little, the feeling apparently lasted until the end of the almost half-hour event. Finally, when he was asked whether he had ever thought about next summer and the final of the European Championships here, in this special place, he answered not with regard to sporting strengths but to Lux’s strengths: “First of all, I hope “The light isn’t so bright at the finale,” he said.
He had the laughs on his side, but another matter that Nagelsmann was only able to shed light on to a certain point put him in a less good mood. Marc-André ter Stegen will play the two games this Saturday (8.45 p.m. in the FAZ live ticker for DFB international matches and on RTL) in Berlin against Turkey and on Tuesday (8.45 p.m. in the FAZ live ticker for DFB international games and on ZDF) in Vienna against Austria because of “acute back pain”, as the national coach informed us right at the beginning that he could neither train nor play.
Because it sounded worrying in its vagueness, there were questions about the nature of the injury and the time the goalkeeper was out of action, which Nagelsmann was unable to answer. Neither do those who will stand in goal instead. He reported that he only found out about the loss at short notice and then only sat with his coaching team for about a quarter of an hour before he once again discussed the “diffuse back pain” of his number one. Ter Stegen had already “felt something” during training the day before, it had gotten worse overnight and over the course of Friday, which is why he will probably travel back to Barcelona on Saturday – the next bulletin will come from there.
Nagelsmann sees Kimmich as a six
Nagelsmann described the immediate effects on his own game as insignificant. “Of course the approach won’t change at all,” he said, “we won’t start bludgeoning every thing forward.” Ter Stegen and Manuel Neuer do stand out among the German goalkeepers when it comes to footballing qualities. But he doesn’t worry about Kevin Trapp, Oliver Baumann and Janis Blaswich either.
The extent to which the failure affects the topic of defensive stability, which is the top learning goal these days, will initially be decided further ahead anyway. If Nagelsmann has his way, even much further ahead. As he did at the end of the trip to the USA, he responded to his team’s defensive vulnerability first and foremost with more dominance. Nagelsmann’s calculation goes like this: More time with the ball means less time having to defend.
In terms of personnel, he said what had already been expected: that Joshua Kimmich would appear in his plans as a six in the center. Benjamin Henrichs, who missed the trip to the USA, is expected to be the right defender.
The way Nagelsmann spoke about the Turks, in terms of stability they will be another very good test for the European Championship emergency: “a very good team in terms of football that doesn’t want to die in beauty”, but rather “a certain straightforwardness” on the way to the goal and put “a lot of offensive personnel” in position for this. The national coach added that he expects Vincenzo Montella’s team, who won the European Championship ticket as Stefan Kuntz’s successor, to bring in a “certain emotionality”, especially at the beginning: for their own fans, who are already in the majority in the Olympic Stadium are allowed to get carried away.
Otherwise, the special German-Turkish relationship was not a big topic on Friday evening. Nagelsmann avoided the question about Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s state visit and possible political messages in the stadium by referring to the sporting competition. Things became more exciting when the national coach spoke about the question of upcoming players who could play for different nations. He wouldn’t get involved, it was a very personal matter, he said. “That’s the beauty of our world, that you can have roots that lie somewhere else, but still feel at home in a country where you live.”
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He only spoke to his captain Ilkay Gündogan “very briefly” about the game, which was of course special for him, but not one that put him in a fundamentally different state of mind. Gündogan is looking forward to it and feels the responsibility to play a good game, said the national coach. In conversation, however, he was still “a relaxed guy” who “isn’t afraid to step onto the field” even under these special circumstances. Nagelsmann himself also didn’t want to appear sensitive to noise. He said it could be noisy – maybe a little more so.
