DFB team against Spain: Almost perfect without the ball

The German team walled up a tactically clever win against Spain. This game of blood, sweat and tears should have an identity-forming effect.

The lightness of a goal scorer: Klara Bühl is happy about her early goal to make it 1-0 Foto: John Sibley/reuters

When the final whistle sounded, Lena Oberdorf collapsed on the lawn, Martina Voss-Tecklenburg took a deep breath. A game that looked like an early final of this tournament was over and won. With 2:0, the Germans had literally walled up a victory over Spain and thus secured early entry into the quarter-finals. It was a fantastic, breathless struggle between two philosophies that didn’t last a minute. You get the ball, we get the points, that was the risky German strategy that almost always goes wrong. To a roaring roar from the Spanish crowd in Brentford, the Germans, sweating and clenching their teeth, executed this act on a razor’s edge to near perfection. It often seemed as if Spain were a minute away, but could now really score. The actual scoring chances, however, remained sparse.

Not many teams can do that, a world-class team can circulate the ball for 90 minutes without even going in. For this “brutally good collective defensive performance” (Hegering), it certainly helped that goalkeeper Sandra Paños played a hair-raising bad pass in the third minute, directly into Klara Bühl’s feet. Bühl, one of the best in the first half with a defensive field performance and the only asset forward, made it 1-0 without humor. In the first half, Alex Popp increased the lead to 2:0 with the second real chance and underlined their importance for the team. The ugly game of the Germans against the beautiful game of the Spaniards bore fruit.

The fact that Voss-Tecklenburg felt compelled to choose this strategy instead of playing along says a lot about the outstanding development of the Spanish team in recent years. And about the development deficit in Germany. “We knew we had two chances to create chances against Spain,” explained Voss-Tecklenburg bluntly afterwards. “First: high pressing, but we can’t keep that up for so long. The second possibility is a deeper pressing in 4-5-1 to close the flanks.”

This was the method of choice for long distances. Sure, she said dryly, maybe more possession would be nice. “Maybe we can develop to have more possession against Spain, but we’re not there yet.” Quite an astonishing admission given that until recently the Spaniards played almost no role internationally.

“Ready to Suffer”

So it was above all the night of the robust warhorses. The strong Lena Oberdorf cleared everything without compromise, while her colleagues ran in front of their own sixteen pass paths. It was a game that looked almost entirely like the final five minutes of a 1-0 lead in the Champions League final. What came through was disposed of as a tower in battle by Marina Hegering. Sophia Kleinherne recommended herself in the second half instead of the sometimes shaky Felicitas Rauch. And Merle Frohms made a world-class save against Caldentey in the 70th minute, after having given the ball away unnecessarily quickly with a few bad passes in the previous phase.