CAPE TOWN — The German team arrived here first for their World Cup rematch on Saturday with Argentina, but Argentina’s traveling fans beat their German counterparts to the bars and beaches of the striking metropolis that South Africans call The Mother City. Scores of men and a few women in Argentina’s white and blue national jerseys were snapping photographs of the sunset on Thursday, bargaining for wood carvings with itinerant salesmen or playing pickup soccer games in the sand.
“This time I hope we win, and I hope we win without penalties,” said Jonas Mosse, a 30-year-old industrial engineer from Buenos Aires, who changed his return ticket to be here for Saturday’s quarterfinal.
The 2006 quarterfinal in Berlin ended acrimoniously with Germany winning on penalty kicks as its goalkeeper, Jens Lehmann, took full advantage of the tip sheet he had brought along to remind himself of the Argentina players’ shooting tendencies. That scrap of paper is now on display at the German federation and will eventually be transferred to the German national soccer museum that is planned for Dortmund.
“Well, at least now we know the trick, so if we go to penalties, I hope Maradona has the paper,” Mosse said. Diego Maradona, now Argentina’s coach and cheerleader-in-chief, was the star of the teams that faced West Germany in the 1986 and 1990 finals. Argentina won in 1986 in Mexico City with Maradona at the height of his powers, but the Germans spoiled the double in 1990 in a deeply negative match in Rome when too much of Maradona’s magic was already gone.
That rich history has helped create plenty of edge this week. The German players have declined to follow the well-entrenched World Cup tradition of holding their tongues, with Bastian Schweinsteiger and the captain Philipp Lahm criticizing the Argentines’ sportsmanship and character.
“‘It starts before the match,” Schweinsteiger said at a news conference. “If you see how they gesticulate, how they try to influence the referee, that is not part of the game. That is a lack of respect. They are just like that.”
The Argentines, at least in public, have kept the tone lighter, with Maradona responding, “What’s with you, Schweinsteiger, are you nervous?”
The genesis of the latest jousting was the stormy denouement of the 2006 quarterfinal, when the German players and disappointed Argentines exchanged words and a few body blows after the penalty kicks, with one of Argentina’s unused reserve players, Leandro Cufré, getting a post-match red card for kicking the German defender Per Mertesacker.
Mertesacker and nine others who played in that game are back for this Cup. “We’ve got freedom of speech in the German team,” Germany Coach Joachim Löw said Friday of Schweinsteiger’s comments. “But if you ask the same question of me, I remember the match four years ago quite differently. I never felt it was unfair or violent. It was hard-fought for 120 minutes.”
“The issue came after the penalties,” he said. “What we need to do is decide the match before penalties.”
What all this repartee will mean here on Saturday afternoon is probably not much, and in competitive terms the most striking thing about these teams is that they have both produced some of the most attractive and offensive-minded soccer of the tournament.
If the current Argentina team bears a certain resemblance to its Cup-winning predecessor with another extraordinary dribbler and predator at its core in Lionel Messi, this German team is a major departure from the country’s soccer past, both in playing style and ethnic makeup. Eleven members of the team could have played for other nations, including the midfielder Mesut Özil, who was born in Germany but has Turkish connections, too.
Özil is an alternately languid and lethal force, one who seems — like great playmakers past in the mold of Zinédine Zidane — to possess a fraction of a second more than those running about more frantically around him.
Time remains the greatest soccer luxury, and Özil and his new teammates also should have plenty of it in front of them. With an average age of 25, they are the youngest German (or West German) team in the World Cup since 1934, if not quite the youngest team in the quarterfinals. That is Ghana, with an average of little more than 24.
One of the theories behind such success is that at the end of another brutally long and enervating European season, young legs are fresher legs, but perhaps it is wise not to get overly enamored of that theory, considering that three of the other quarterfinalists — Brazil, Paraguay and the Netherlands — were among the Cup’s oldest teams.
Regardless, Germany clearly has a special generation in its colors, and the quality of the Bundesliga has clearly been undervalued abroad in an age when England’s Premier League rules the airwaves. No member of Germany’s teams is more surprising or effective than the 20-year-old attacking midfielder Thomas Müller, who as recently as May 2009 was still playing third-division matches in Germany for Bayern Munich’s reserve team.
Little more than a year later, after being promoted in a hurry by Bayern’s coach, Louis van Gaal, and then by Löw, he is one of the main attractions of the Cup, with three goals and three assists. Off the field, he looks gangly, even ungainly, as he shuffles about. But on the field he is a cool-headed, counterattacking artist in motion, with an innate feel for a pass and a remarkable knack for creating work space for himself down the right wing.
He has come a long way since he made his debut for the national team in March in a 1-0 loss to Argentina in Germany, when Maradona, who did not recognize him, declined to stay seated next to him for a news conference.
“Now I have won two titles and played in the Champions League with Bayern, so a few things have changed,” Müller said.
By CHRISTOPHER CLAREY for The New York Times
Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/03/sports/soccer/03iht-WCARENA.html
