2010 World Cup last 16 preview: Germany v England
These two have met before you know.
Simultaneous events in Port Elizabeth, where the full-time whistle blew on England’s win over Slovenia, and in Pretoria, where Landon Donovan was scoring a 92nd-minute winner for the USA against Algeria, combined to make this happen, again, and so the hype began.
Germany, winners of Group D, face England, Group C’s runners-up, in Bloemfontein this afternoon. This is more than just a sporting conflict though, but you probably knew that.
There’s more than a bit of previous between the Germans and the English, and as the war rhetoric in several of the nation’s newspapers, let’s stick to events on the pitch shall we?
A glance through both countries’ football history books (Germany’s being a lot bigger and more trophy-filled than England’s) will show that these two have a habit of facing each other on football’s biggest stages.
From the n**i salute that the England team were obliged to give when facing the Germans in 1938, to English football’s finest hour in 1966, the Germans’ revenge in Mexico four years later, Italia ’90, Turin, Gazza’s tears and all that, Dietmar Hamann’s winner demolishing the old Wembley, Michael Owen in Munich, it’s all been there. Throw in a couple of lively European Championship meetings too and a great sporting rivalry is confirmed.
Right, now that’s covered, it’s onto the new chapter.
Germany looked better than England in the group stages. A 4-0 win over Australia was followed by a defeat to Serbia that can be largely explained away by Miroslav Klose’s harsh red card and Lukas Podolski’s missed penalty (yes, missed penalty).
When they had to beat Ghana in their final match they did, 1-0 courtesy of a Mesut Özil goal, and a deserved qualification was achieved.
England did what they had to do in their last game too.
An indifferent performance against the USA was followed by a display against Algeria that would have to go a long way to be described as indifferent, but a Jermain Defoe strike in the final game with Slovenia was enough to send them through.
They’ve hardly sparkled though, with Defoe’s goal joining captain Steven Gerrard’s early effort against the Americans as a misfiring England’s only goals of the competition. That surely has to change if World Cup dreams are to be realised.
It now becomes a question of belief.
Fabio Capello’s jubilant celebrations after the Slovenia win were perceived as out of character, but they were indicative of the hole that England had found themselves in with their poor performances up until that point. You could almost see the pressure lifting off his shoulders, and those of his players too. Yet the identity of their second-round opponents has heaped all of that pressure back on, and then some.
There is no doubt that, player for player, this England team can more than match and better Germany, but the real game will take place in their heads.
The nation has already fallen under “penalty paranoia”, convinced that once again a battle with the Germans will be decided from the spot, and that once again the Germans will win. They do so all the time anyway don’t they?
For their part, Germany will think that they can win it earlier.
World Cup legend Franz Beckenbauer has once again been spouting his own particular brand of sweet nothings in English ears. It was “stupid” of them to finish second in their group apparently, therefore setting up a match that “should have been much later in the competition.”
Maybe it should have been, but England would not have relished playing this young, hungry side then either, as talents such as Özil, Podolski and Thomas Müller have the ability to hurt them.
But Gerrard, Wayne Rooney and Defoe can hurt the Germans too. The question now has to be whether they believe they can.
That, more than anything else, holds the key.
England expects.
Prediction: Germany 1 England 2
Mark Jones
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