Following the group stage exit at the Qatar World Cup, Germany won their first match of 2023, a friendly with Peru in Mainz. Their recent record has been startlingly poor. Yet with Germany, one of Europe’s and the world’s most decorated football nations, the feeling that they were heading for a damp squib of a performance on the pitch next summer was, and is, entirely justifiable. For host nations to worry that they are going to show themselves up in front of the world ahead of putting on a major tournament is nothing new. On Wednesday there will be exactly nine months to the start of Euro 2024, which Germany will kick off with the opening match in the Allianz Arena in Munich, the setting for some of Flick’s greatest career triumphs. The Deutscher Fußball-Bund (DFB) announced his sacking on Sunday afternoon while Germany’s basketball team were midway through a magnificent victory in the World Cup final with Serbia – underlining, on one hand, the clumsiness and the dysfunctional workings of the body at board level, and on the other communicating the sense of panic that led them to this point. If Hansi Flick had hoped this nadir would be the first step on a similar path to glorious redemption, it quickly became clear that there was to be no reprise of that scenario. ![]() When France lost to a late Alan Shearer goal in their second game of the tournament in June 1997, cries of ‘Jacquet démission’ (‘Jacquet resign’) tumbled from the stands of the Mosson in Montpellier. ![]() It wasn’t only about Roberto Carlos’s banana free-kick and the emergence of Paul Scholes, but about French supporters venting their frustrations with their national coach, Aimé Jacquet. ![]() The chorus of boos that ushered Germany’s team from the field at full time after Saturday’s humbling at home to Japan might have taken supporters of a certain vintage back 26 years, to Le Tournoi.
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