Rio De Janeiro, Brazil (BBN)-Immortality. Not for Lionel Messi but for a group of Germany players who have conquered the world.
For Mario Gotze – the second-half substitute who made history as he volleyed in the winner deep into extra-time, reports goal.com.
For the people running German football who decided on a complete restructure of the country’s youth system when they were humiliated 14 years ago at the European Championship.
Their mission is complete. Germany have reached the finish line and nobody can dispute that they are now the best team on the planet. Germans in beer houses from Rio to Berlin can raise a glass and toast a team that won the country their fourth World Cup and a first in 24 years.
As they celebrated on the pitch with their families at full-time, the Germany players could not hold back their tears of joy. Even Angela Merkel, their Chancellor, was on the receiving end of hugs from nation’s new heroes.
This was the culmination of a project that started in earnest in 2002 when changes were implemented requiring all 36 clubs in the two Bundesliga divisions to operate centrally regulated academies.
It has created a conveyor belt of top quality talents who play with technical brilliance and attacking cohesion. Germany may not have one star man like Lionel Messi for Argentina. They have a whole team of them.
If it wasn’t for Spain’s dominance of international football, they might not have had to wait so long to win a major international tournament. But it was worth it.
It was worth keeping faith in Joachim Low for the last eight years, backing the coach’s vision to reach this moment.
The semi-final massacre of Brazil will go down as one of the finest performances in World Cup history and they were never going to reach those heights here. But from the first minute, they were superior to Argentina, playing with technical quality, defensive solidity and attacking fluency.
They dealt with every obstacle. From the pre-match injury that forced out Sami Khedira during the warm-up to the concussion that meant his replacement Christophe Kramer did not even make it to half-time, they took it all in their stride.
Gotze was named man-of-the-match for his winner, but nobody epitomised Germany’s display better than Bastian Schweinsteiger.
The Bayern Munich midfielder ended the match as a wounded warrior, sporting a cut below his eye, but for 120 minutes he controlled the tempo of the game, demanding the ball from colleagues and making his team tick.
BBN/AS-14July14-1:30pm (BST)
