World Cup: For Germany, a defeat both stunning and foreboding

Spain might have done it last time around, but that was a one-off. Yes, there was Italy, too, of course, four years before that. The circumstances this time are completely different, though. And, fine, exactly the same thing happened to France back in 2002, but that’s France.

Germany, obviously, is different. Germany would not be so careless as to make the same mistake.

It would be foolish, even after a chastening 1-0 defeat to Mexico on Sunday, to suggest that Germany, the reigning champion, might not even make it out of the group stage at this World Cup.

When it was pointed out to the country’s coach, Joachim Löw, that three of the last four champions have suffered precisely that fate, he dismissed it as not just a curiosity and a quirk but an irrelevance.

“I have no idea why that might be the case,” he said. “But we will qualify for the next round.”

His confidence, his coolness, is understandable. Germany has too much quality to fall at the first hurdle. Defeat to Mexico is a setback, a test, but there is no reason it should prove fatal.

Germany has two more games — against competent, but hardly daunting, opposition in the form of Sweden and South Korea — to put things right and claim a place in the sweet 16.

It is something of a blow that finishing as the runner-up in the group might mean a meeting with Brazil in the first knockout round, but it is hardly unthinkable that Germany might yet win the group or, failing that, beat Brazil, should it be required.

Germany’s hopes of becoming the first country to retain the World Cup since Brazil in 1962 did not evaporate in the raucous noise of Luzhniki Stadium. The fact that Germany has lost a game is not a disaster.

The manner in which it came about, though, is most certainly a cause for concern. Not simply the sight, in those last few desperate minutes, of a Germany team that has always seemed so composed suddenly in utter disarray. Even Löw, guarded and cautious in defeat, described his players as “haphazard.”

He also acknowledged that “the spatial distribution was not ideal”: the technical term is that Germany was all over the place. Only Jerome Boateng remained in defence; Joshua Kimmich, the diminutive right back, was apparently playing as a striker; the midfield lost all discernible shape, and discipline, and order.

That is worrying enough; even more significant is that Mexico had planned for exactly that eventuality.

For six months, Juan Carlos Osorio, Mexico’s coach, had worked on a blueprint just for this game. He had to adapt it, slightly, because of injury or loss of form, he said, but he knew exactly what he wanted to do, knew exactly how he felt Mexico might beat Germany.

The simple stuff is, in truth, fairly self-explanatory. He started with two bolts of lightning on the wing, including Hirving Lozano, scorer of the goal that secured what the player described as “one of the most famous wins” in Mexican history.

Osorio deployed Miguel Layún, of Sevilla, as an attack-minded midfielder, tasking him with kick-starting the rapid counterattacks he felt could expose Germany’s defence, pushed further forward than Osorio believed was wise.

More subtly, he asked Carlos Vela to drop a little deeper than normal, to prevent Germany midfielders Sami Khedira and Toni Kroos from settling into a rhythm. He warned Vela, the Los Angeles FC forward, it would be a tough job.

“We wanted him to give us his all for 60 minutes,” Osorio said. “It was a great physical task. That was all we had in our budget.”

Osorio spent the day before the game drilling his players in how to catch Germany on the break even when “defending with four midfielders” drafted in to help buffer the back line. “That is how we almost scored the second,” he said. Vela had been an inch or two away from collecting a Javier Hernández pass and settling the game.

As Osorio explained his preparations in his postgame news conference, it was striking how accurate his intuition had been.

“We knew the substitutions they make when they are losing,” he said.

Mexico had been reminded of how to handle the aerial threat of Mario Gomez, the striker who came on late. “We prepared the use of him up front,” Osorio said.

It is easy to claim agency in the aftermath, of course — to explain victory not as a consequence of a host of factors, including blind, dumb luck, but as the only possible outcome of some brilliant master plan. All managers know precisely how a game is going to pan out, except when it doesn’t.

Osorio took an educated guess. It might not have worked: Had Kroos’ free kick flown under the crossbar, rather than into the middle of it, a moment after Lozano’s goal, the plan might have fallen apart. That it succeeded can be, as Löw would prefer, put down as misfortune.

If anything, what should concern the German coach more is that Osorio could construct such a detailed, definitive plan. He felt he had such a clear idea of what Germany’s weaknesses were that he could speculate — with some degree of confidence, and months in advance — how Löw would react in any given situation.

There is a thread that links France in 2002, Italy in 2010 and Spain in 2014, and the way they crumbled immediately when asked to defend their crown.

All three still bore many of the same faces who had helped them conquer the world four years previously. All three looked faded, stale, predictable. Their rivals had grown, developed, caught up and overtaken them. They, meanwhile, had stood still, wallowing in the afterglow of glory.

Löw is probably right, of course: There is no reason to believe that the same thing will necessarily happen to Germany. Sunday’s defeat may even prove a useful jolt out of any complacency, though, as Germany’s Mats Hummels pointed out afterward, poor performances in friendlies against Saudi Arabia and Austria before the tournament were supposed to be the warnings. Germany should not have required another.

There is still time to heed it.

Just because France, Italy and Spain could not defend their crowns does not automatically condemn Germany to the same fate. Löw and his team might be different, and to an extent they should be.

But that applies in the converse, too: Just because Germany succeeded four years ago does not mean it will do so again. History does not always repeat itself, which is a source of solace as much as concern.

© 2018 New York Times News Service