Stuttgart / Berlin – What do you do when you come under pressure as a national coach, for example during a World Cup qualification? Quite simply: You bet on a Bayern block. In other words: In the upcoming key game, you mainly rely on professionals who are employed by the German record champions and who are therefore ultimately best able to cope with such pressure situations.
No wonder then that the former Bayern coach Hansi Flick sent six Bayern professionals to the field in his second game as national coach on Sunday evening in Stuttgart, namely: Manuel Neuer, Niklas Süle, Joshua Kimmich, Leon Goretzka, Leroy Sané and Serge Gnabry. Working title: Six Bayern professionals for a hallelujah against Armenia! Result: a pretty impressive 6: 0 (4: 0), which takes the German national team’s biggest worries away in the current competition. After five matchdays, there are twelve points again, while the Armenians have ten points and the Romanians nine points.
Goretzka magically serves Gnabry
The problem for the Armenians was not just the Bayern block, but also their own match schedule. Supported by their pretty good results in qualifying for the upcoming tournament in Qatar in late autumn, they wanted to play cheerfully from the start, well, foolishly. That gave the German Bayern team the space that every team needs to create opportunities on a regular basis. Yes, the space for fun in the game. The 1: o was really hard to defend by Serge Gnabry.
Goretzka, who played for Ilkay Gündogan in central midfield, had put his club mate Gnabry in the shooting position in a rather magical way with a chip ball over the last row of the Armenians, Gnabry in turn did not torch for long and Armenia’s goalkeeper David Yurchenko with a full-cocked shot left no time to raise hands. Dream gate à la Bavaria.
Moments of happiness for Werner and Reus
This hit set automatisms and ball relay in motion, which were repeatedly greeted with applause by the audience. Which the Armenians eventually plunged from one embarrassment to the other. It could have been 7-0 or 8-0 at halftime, after another goal from Gnabry (19th) after preliminary work by Sané, after moments of happiness for Marco Reus (35th) and Timo Werner (44th) it was after 45 Minutes finally 4: 0, which reflected the balance of power between the four-time world champion and the 88th in the world rankings pretty well.
Now, however, the German national team was by no means satisfied with this interim result. Even after the break, the lines of the guests were played over at top speed, thus creating numerous opportunities to close the goal. And after Jonas Hofmann from Mönchengladbach had scored the 5-0 with an unsustainable long-range shot, Flick was able to give the future some game practice. The 18-year-old Jamal Musiala, also a Bayern professional, came for Sané, who was celebrated by the audience, while the 18-year-old Florian Wirtz, not yet a Bayern professional, came for Reus. Yes, Flick’s team may have a little more potential than the long-term skeptics assume. It was Wirtz who skilfully prepared the final point (90th). With a cross pass to the debutant Karim Adeyemi, to a 19-year-old who is under contract with RB Salzburg and played for FC Bayern in his youth.
On Wednesday against the scandal-ridden Icelanders
Next Wednesday, the selection of the DFB in Reykjavík will have to play against the host Icelanders. She meets a team that on the one hand is still as well staffed in terms of name as it was five years ago when the Northmen got into a frenzy at the European Championship and only failed in the quarter-finals to hosts France, on the other hand by one these days profound scandal is moved.
At the center of the affair: record scorer Kolbeinn Sigthorsson, who has since admitted that he behaved inappropriately towards two women in a bar in 2017, but still believes that he did not sexually molest the women or even cause them violence . The women’s accusation is different, which is why the Icelandic association, which has no leadership after the resignation of the entire board, suspended the attacker for the three World Cup qualifiers these days. So also for the game against Germany, although that shouldn’t be important for a German national team with a Bayern block and newly gained self-confidence.