Goalscoring midfielders hold the key for Germany

Published on Saturday 28 June 2008 19:46

IT WOULD be tempting to describe the Germans as the luckiest team ever to get to a major international championship final.

Against a weakened Turkey in the semi they should have been down and out before half time but somehow managed to scrape the narrowest of wins via Phillip Lahm's last-minute goal. Until this game the full-back appeared to be the only dependable German defender but even he was taken to the cleaners time and again by the rampaging Turks.

They did of course emerge from their group, but it was by some distance the easiest of the four. Even then they made hard work of Austria, lost to the Croatians and saw off the Poles mostly with the aid of their opponents' comedy defending.

The much-lauded Joachim Lw only settled on the successful 4-2-3-1 formation after his preferred 4-4-2 patently failed because he couldn't find two forwards capable of playing up front together. Miroslav Klose isn't looking much better on his own, even if he has scored a couple, but it has been the three attacking midfielders behind him – Bastian Schweinsteiger, Michael Ballack and Lukas Podolski – who have crucially provided seven of their 10 goals so far.

The coach deserves credit for making the change but they have still looked less than convincing in any game other than the quarter-final against Portugal. The base of their problems is at the centre of defence where Christoph Metzelder and Per Mertesacker have so many weaknesses it is hard to know where to begin. Poor distribution, little understanding of each other's play, an inability to track players who move them wide out of their comfort zones and amazingly average defending in the air from set pieces is just a start. These all pale when you watch their reaction to any striker who comes off them to receive the ball deeper. There appears to be an almost pathological fear of moving from the security of that back line.

Maybe this is why Lw decided to deploy two deep-lying midfielders to crowd this area. The problem in the semi-final was that without Torsten Frings in the first half, neither Thomas Hitzlsperger nor Simon Rolfes, who were detailed to do the tackling and closing down, seemed willing or able to do so.

So how on earth have they found themselves in the final tonight? Well maybe as a team they have an aversion to do anything more than just enough to win each game, and that isn't always a bad thing in a tournament that demands seven big performances in 21 days at the end of a long hard season. There is also that attacking midfield triumvirate who know how to score goals. Schweinsteiger works hard, is powerful and gets into good scoring positions, particularly when the play is building down the left with Podolski and Lahm.

Podolski (pictured) is one of the cleanest strikers of a ball you will ever see and rarely needs more than two touches to get a shot on target with power – the mark of a true striker. Ballack is of course the one world class act they have when he is on form and he has been hitting the heights more often than not during most of 2008. He is also hugely dangerous in the air going forward. With the centre backs' height allied with Ballack and Klose's phenomenal leap, they will certainly cause the Spaniards some problems.

Their biggest strength is of course their winning mentality. They have believed they are going to win the tournament right from day one. Call it arrogance or just colossal self-assurance, it patently works and has worked for decades even when they are far from the best team in a competition. If they could bottle that ability to believe, every team in every sport on the planet would be queuing up to buy it.