Highs and Löw

Published on Saturday 28 June 2008 19:45

MAYBE HIS fitted white shirts haven't been sweaty enough; his luxuriant, sculpted black barnet all-too-lacking in life-lived white or bare patches, and his age and pedigree just too darn in-between. Whatever, it has required Joachim Löw to become one of the last two team leaders standing at Euro 2008 for the Germany coach to attract the sort of fascination and froth previously reserved for the profusely perspiring Fatih Terim, round-the-block blokes such as final foe Luis Aragones, Guus Hi

Lw's banishment to the stand for an exchange of words with the fourth official during his team's final group game win over Austria made him newsworthy for a brief interlude, as did his claims that he had considered resigning after the loss to Croatia in the previous match. Yet most reflections on these events appeared along the line of the 'perhaps he isn't such a dullard after all'. His subsequent debarring from instructing his side for their quarter-final against Portugal coincided with Germany's most emphatic form and a 3-2 victory.

Yet the urbane, well-preserved 48-year-old from the hillside town of Schnau in the Black Forest has found himself in charge of Europe's most consistently successful national side. Coaches come and go in Germany, but "the winning mentality that everyone (else] is afraid of", as Franz Beckenbauer put it, seems to endure. In Vienna tonight, Germany will contest their 13th final in a major international tournament and seek another honour to be placed alongside three European Championships and three World Cups. Lw is merely the sixth man to lead his nation to a decider in one of these big two.

Coaching might appear to matter less than national character where Germany's unparalleled ability to be in the shakedown for accolades is concerned. On Friday, one newspaper gave five reasons why "Germany always win" (it was stretching the point). Good management of the team did not figure. However, Lw's input perhaps sets him apart from trophy-snaring predecessors.

It has become fashionable for the BBC's analysts to preface any grudging respect for Germany's progress in Euro 2008 with the caveat that they are "not a good side". Only Michael Ballack is exempted. Some have suggested that Torsten Frings and Philipp Lahm can be added to the short list of Germany's "class players". Under Lw, however, this group of ordinary talents have lost only three times in 27 outings and put Germany in their first European Championship final since they won it 12 years ago. They may have been fortunate to squeeze past Turkey in the semi-final but Beckenbauer deemed the first half-hour against Portugal his country's best passage of play in more than a decade.

Lw must be doing something right, then. And he has been doing that for longer than his period in charge, which began when he stepped up to replace Jrgen Klinsmann after Germany finished third in the World Cup finals on home soil in 2006. Lw was more than a simple assistant for the two years previous under Klinsmann. As revealed in the fly-on-the-wall film of the World Cup, Germany: A Summer Fairytale, Lw provided the tactical masterplan behind the country's conversion to a high tempo, more openly attacking, strategy.

It seemed a power-behind-the-throne role might have suited Lw. He has no interest in media celebrity, gives few insights to journalists as to his personal tastes and rarely appears in public with wife Daniela, a teacher who values her privacy. But the crown has sat comfortably on the coiffured bonce of the personable, and it has been said, "professorial" 'Jogi' (as in 'Yogi'). In polls in his homeland, he is regularly adjudged Germany's most trustworthy public figure and his respectful subjects trusted him to become only the second Germany coach after Jupp Derwall in 1980 to emerge a winner from his first finals.

Lw hasn't done much winning in his football life. An unremarkable playing career that spanned from 1978 to 1995, he was a forward who went backwards each time he stepped up to Bundesliga. He failed to establish himself with VfB Stuttgart, Eintracht Frankfurt and Karlsruher, each time falling back to the comfort of first club Freiburg. He then had two year stints with Swiss clubs Schaffhausen and Winterthur.

Klinsmann's 2004 call for him to join the national set-up made for his eighth posting in little more than eight years.

After short-lived coaching stints at various clubs in Germany and Turkey, Lw's stock began to rise when he guided Austrian club Tirol Innsbruck to a third consecutive championship, seven months after arriving there in October 2001. Regard for his efforts was founded on the fact the club were careering towards bankruptcy and shedding players like skins. He demonstrated he could sustain an entire footballing operation by making himself a visible and voluble presence that united a club that had splintered into factions in the boardroom, playing side and supporting groups.

Lw commanded further respect for showing an unwillingness to bail out and save his own skin, intimating he would stay on to lead the reconstituted club in the third division… before he found himself with no players. After several months out of work, he was handed the coaching reins at Austria Vienna in March 2003. Steering the defending league champions well off course, nine months later he found himself resting again.

It should be some time before Lw is again short of offers for work. German Federation chief Theo Zwanziger is eager to discuss an extension to his coach's current contract, which presently covers the 2010 World Cup finals.

Whether or not Spain fall under the spell of the Germans tonight, going into that tournament the appreciation of his acumen in the coaching sphere will be on a high for Lw.