THROUGH THE RUMBLE and the crack of thunder came the clarity: Germany is once again yoked to its national football team.
The nation is ready to dream and hurt again, and confirmation came on the night Dortmund’s famous stand was rebranded as the Black, Red, and Yellow Wall.
The national team have slumped down the country’s hierarchy of affections in recent years because, plainly, they haven’t been winning often enough. Tonight, remarkably, was their first win in the knockout stage of a major tournament since Euro 2016.
Amid this run of form the national team has become the lightning rod for either national culture wars or provincial peacocking. The latter was evident prior even before tonight’s game, in the national clamour for Dortmund’s own Niclas Fullkrug to play ahead of Kai Havertz: 90% of Bild readers called for Fullkurg ahead of kick off.
Fullkrug fits the local attitude to the game in the sense he looks like the kind of guy you’d meet down a mineshaft. Havertz, by contrast, strikes you as the kind of guy who’d tut with annoying disinterest as you tell him yes, I’ve tried turning it off and on again.
But this white-knuckle, storm-delayed win over Denmark should provide some national unity toward the team over the next fortnight or so, because it marks Germany out as the most alluring kind of contender of all: the slugging, feet-shuffling heavyweight carrying a glass chin.
Germany won the game on the gut-punch swing of two razor-thin VAR decisions perhaps calculated to break Joachim Andersen’ heart. Andersen initially thought he had given Denmark an early second-half lead when he buried the ball into the corner of the net after some penalty-box pinball only for the Premier League’s very own VAR addicts, Michael Oliver and Stuart Atwell, to use their tech to identify an offside not visible to the human eye.
Detective Atwell then spotted a marginal handball by Andersen, as his arm dangled out and hit David Raum’s cross. Oliver went to the monitor, pointed to the spot, and Havertz buried the penalty. He and his team-mates celebrated by taking their second shower of the night, as they were soaked beneath a hail of Danish fans’ beer.
It was technically the right decision to award a penalty, but, in a moral sense, it was brutally unfair. Raum wasn’t shooting at goal and Andersen didn’t intend to handle the ball, and Germany’s reward was a free and odds-on shot at goal. The sooner indirect free-kicks are given for these infringements, the better.
But it would be churlish to claim Germany didn’t deserve to win all the same. Jamal Musiala added a second when he skated clear from Nico Schlotterbeck’s fabulous long pass, and they wasted a hatful of subsequent chances to gloss the scoreboard.
And yet Germany do have some jarring vulnerabilities whenever they are not ahead. They send their full-backs forward in the traditional style and leave three players at home – one of them Toni Kroos – to guard against counter-attacks, and Rasmus Hojlund should have exposed this flimsy kind of security at the end of the first-half, only for Manuel Neuer to save at his feet following a swift Danish counter. If you’re going to beat Germany, you’re going to have to score first.
That first half was 22 minutes longer than planned, suspended just after its half-hour mark because of the risk of lightning. (Was it Fullkrug who was floating above the stadium at the time, hurling lightning bolts and crying havoc across the sky? It’s not for us to say. But let’s just say nobody saw him on the pitch at the time.)
Germany started with their own kind of fury and had one goal disallowed and another six shots in an ultimately fruitless opening quarter, at which point everyone began reckoning with what was to come.
The first half-hour was played out beneath a mackerel sky, constantly lit by strobes of lightning. It was just past the 33rd-minute mark in which the lightning came closer, and streaked in forks across the sky. Then came a brutal, heart-popping BANG so loud it briefly took the players aback. The stadium appeared to have been struck by lightning, at which point Oliver suspended play. Great pellets of hail rained down as waterfalls sluiced down the four corners of the ground: most fans sought shelter but a couple of Danes danced beneath the heaviest of the waterfalls.
The last of the first-half was played out before everyone committed to a full half-time break – this time without the interesting weather to act as a distraction for fans – and the game then resumed with more standing around as VAR twice goaded Andersen.
But while Germany looked vulnerable before they led, Julian Nagelsmann wasn’t about to allow the same issues take hold. He introduced Fullkrug and Emre Can, the latter dropping into play centre-back so that Germany played a back three without the ball. But more impressive was what they did when they had it, as Can, Kroos, and Joshua Kimmich knocked the ball among them to draw some desperate Danish players in towards them. That was their cue to hit Germany’s many runners in behind: Havertz should have scored a second when he glided through, while Wirtz had a goal chalked off for offside, owing to Fullkrug’s position.
And when Germany did have to defend, they did so staunchly, led by the hilariously melodramatic Antonio Rudiger, who manages to exert an astounding amount of control over situations in which he looks completely frantic bewildered.
Germany are vulnerable and are not perfect, but in a division filled with flawed contenders, they don’t need to be.
They will likely face Spain in the quarter-final in what would be a fitting final. They will be confident after this latest storm they can call progress.
