The idea, Joachim Löw had said, was "to bid Germany farewell with a smile". Friday's effortless 6-1 win over Armenia in the last friendly did leave some happy faces behind in Mainz, but the national manager boarded the plane to Brazil with a fresh, deep furrow on his forehead.
On top of other worries, Löw must now make do without Marco Reus, his best attacking midfielder/false No9. The 25-year-old damaged a ligament in an ankle in an innocuous tackle in the centre-circle and was ruled out the next morning.
“A dream has burst from one second to the next,” said the Borussia Dortmund player.
If Reus's absence has not quite punctured Germany's dream of a first trophy since Euro 96, it certainly added to what has been a fairly deflating build-up. The training camp in south Tyrol started with embarrassing revelations about off-pitch misdemeanours – Löw had lost his drivers' licence for speeding, Dortmund's Kevin Groflkreutz had been caught urinating in a Berlin hotel lobby – and was overshadowed throughout by doubts about the fitness of key players like the goalkeeper Manuel Neuer (Bayern Munich), striker Miroslav Klose (Lazio) midfielders Sami Khedira (Real Madrid) and Bastian Schweinsteiger (Bayern), and the Germany captain Philipp Lahm.
The injury to Reus was the sort of accident that can happen at any moment, but in the context of the past 10 days it seemed like a cruel, logical punchline.
The upshot of all this has been a very peculiar, unforgiving form of pessimism. Many Germans do not truly expect Die Nationalmannschaft to win the tournament – Löw even had to address questions about a group-stage exit and admitted that "change would be necessary" if that catastrophe came to pass. But at the same time, nobody is prepared to accept that anything but a triumph in the final at the Maracaña on 13 July should be the target.
It is a difficult, almost impossible, starting position, but as it turns out that is just how Lahm likes it. The 30-year-old breezily dismisses the pressure of having no room for error.
“I actually really like the fact that expectations are so high,” he says. “Firstly, it’s normal: we have had two third-place finishes and we have try and to improve on that in Brazil. This team has been together for a long time, we have come very far.
Tabloid media
“Of course they want us to win the
World Cup
back home. Maybe it would be easier for us if there were no expectations, if we were able to play with a sense of freedom. But that’s not our reality. I’d much rather be considered one of the favourites than one of the underdogs”.
This sentiment echoes a lifetime in the service of Bayern, the club who consider every single defeat as an embarrassing stain on their reputation. Lahm was 12 years old when he joined the Bundesliga’s record title winners and the club’s you-have-to-win-everything attitude to the game has seeped deep into Lahm’s psyche.
It's taken a few years before the tabloid media and the stammtisch (regulars of beer gardens and pubs) really warmed to the small, boyish, quiet full-back. They liked their leaders bigger, harder, brasher.
But Champions League success with Bayern in 2013 has opened the remaining detractors’ eyes to Lahm’s unassuming brilliance.
His consistency is so dependable – “he cannot play badly,” Bayern’s assistant coach and mentor Hermann Gerland has said – that serial wins tend to follow by way of natural consequence. There remains but one box to tick, one extra mile to be run. Can he do it, can his Germany do it?
“Yes, I believe so,” Lahm says without a moment’s hesitation. “I have seen how this team has worked in training, and I know that we will work hard and get things done in the next few days. There is enough time for all of us to be at our best against Portugal.”
As a veteran of the 2006 World Cup in Germany, when Bild had campaigned to relieve Jürgen Klinsmann of his command in the wake of disastrous 4-1 defeat to Italy that March, and 2010 in South Africa, when the loss of Michael Ballack to injury just before the tournament was widely interpreted as a harbinger of doom, Lahm knows that his countrymen have a tendency to overdose on angst.
The view from the dressing room is a different one. Much more optimistic. Or realistic, as he would put it. He rattles through the list of players with fitness concerns. Neuer, Schweinsteiger, Khedira: “They will all be all right,” he insists.
Ankle injury
Lahm himself has come through 45 minutes against Armenia with no complaints, his first game since picking up an ankle injury in the DFB Cup final against Dortmund at the end of May.
Only the unfortunate Reus will fail to make it. “It’s a real shame for him and for us,” Lahm says. “But we are lucky to have other options.”
Arsenal's Lukas Podolski, who had become a forgotten man in the last couple of years, has reappeared just in time, looking sharp and ready to fill the void on the left.
At Euro 2012, discontent within the ranks was one of the many reasons why Germany fell short. Under Löw’s enlightened, stylistically uncompromising guidance, the norm has been turned on its head. Efficiency in the opposition box and defensive rigidity, two basic traits that Germany could always fall back upon, have become scarce commodities.
Lahm agrees that there is a need to balance creative capacity with more protection for the back four – “The mix needs to be right, we have to be a lot more careful in the way we switch from possession into defending” – but feels that the efficiency debate is in itself proof of progress.
For all his confidence, there is one rather important detail Lahm does not yet know: his position on the pitch. Pep Guardiola has redeployed him in central midfield at Bayern; the transformation has been an unqualified success.
It will be fascinating, not least because moving Germany’s one undeniable world-class player over the last decade into the middle would amount to an admission of sorts. The solution to the malaise in defensive midfield may have been staring Joachim Löw in the face all along, with a steely, youthful smile. Guardian Service
