Jurgen Klinsmann is looking just fabulous. Sleek and tanned, a thoroughly marvellous advertisement for turning 50 and living in California. His pre-match press conference in the Aviva couldn't be more different than the tetchfest Martin O'Neill conducted in the afternoon. Laid-back and light-hearted. Not a single question about the Aston Villa assistant manager.
It's 20 years since Klinsmann arrived in Dublin to score his very first goal as a Tottenham player. Signed after the USA World Cup, he was the star attraction in Tolka Park that August and ran onto a second-half dribble by Nick Barmby to stroke home the only goal in a drab friendly against Shelbourne. Or so we told him.
"Did I?" he smiled. "That was many moons ago. Yeah, I have memories. I was at Spurs last week and I saw some old teammates. They're nice memories to have. I was surprised at the time how many Spurs fans were in Ireland. I think there were 12,000 people and 11,000 of them were Spurs supporters. That was how I got my wake-up call actually of who Tottenham really were. It was a nice wake-up call."
Momentum
Two decades on, he brings the team that woke its own country up to soccer over the summer along to Dublin to see can they keep some momentum behind them. The World Cup changed what Americans expect from the game and from their national team. The derision is gone, the dismissal is gone. Klinsmann’s biggest task between now and 2018 is to improve enough to justify the excitement that will come their way.
“We were very pleased with the World Cup, even if we felt we could have gone a bit further. This is a learning curve and we want to improve and hopefully move on another couple of steps. We want to make the next World Cup better than the last one and that process has pretty much started already.
“Step by step we want to develop a team that is able to go further in the World Cup and to win knockout games. The earlier that we can throw our players into a stress environment and make demands of them the better.
Very demanding
“A lot of our players coming through that World Cup experience, was very emotional, very demanding physically and mentally – they needed a break from it all. A lot of our European players went on vacation, got their breather but lost starting positions in their clubs because they missed pre-season a little bit and others got in ahead of them.
“Now they’re catching up, step-by-step. It weighs on you. It tires you out, it grinds you hard. So we just take the players and the way they develop and we observe them. I saw how everyone was dealing with it – some of them have been a little bit up and down here and there and they have to learn to deal with that.
“It’s okay to have a couple of bad weeks as long as you hang in there and you have the right attitude, sooner or later you come out of that. So I think the whole year of 2014 has been tremendous experience for our players, especially the players who played in their first World Cup. I mean it’s a totally different ball game.”
In Brazil, they became everyone’s second favourite team because they never stopped. At times outclassed, they were never outrun and never outbattled. But though that high-tempo, all-action game won them friends, it didn’t win them enough matches and probably cost them late on against Portugal in Manaus when they were just too shattered to stop a late equaliser going in.
“What we are trying in our process is to realise how the best teams in the world play the game and how we can one day really compete with them and beat team, so what does it take to beat a Germany? What does it take to beat a Spain or a Brazil or Argentina one day and go eye-to-eye with them?
“They set the tone. The tone is set also coming out of Champions League. The European Champions League sets the tone in terms of tactical changes that you see in the game or how certain teams are put together by the best coaches in the world.
“America is a melting pot and it’s the same in our soccer environment. It’s a melting pot we have, players with European background, a lot of Hispanic background, American background, so we all have to put the pieces together the best way it fits us and make the best out of it.”
The MLS play-offs have robbed him of a couple of players for tonight's game, just as it has taken Martin O'Neill's captain back across the Atlantic. Klinsmann was glowing when he talked about the impact that Robbie Keane has had during his stint with LA Galaxy.
“In the United States, Robbie Keane is a role model for all the American players growing up in this beautiful game. That’s what he’s done since he came overseas, he shows to the young players what it takes to become a professional, how much dedication you need, how much commitment you need.
“Robbie is the same Robbie in training as in the game, so he’s huge for MLS because these are the type of players you need in an environment to help the league grow and to make younger players understand what the real big players are doing.”
