shocking elimination at the hands of Paraguay<\/a> on penalty kicks in the Round of 32.<\/p>\nPenalty kicks! You know the \u2018Elfmeter\u2019 shots that Germany historically never misses.<\/p>\n
Germany had never lost a World Cup shootout before, and had won six of seven in major tournaments. Yet at Gillette Stadium outside Boston they had three players miss, including Jonathan Tah who sent his spot kick higher over the bar than most Adam Vinatieri field goals in the same stadium for the Patriots.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is a complete disaster, yet another failure,\u201d Fox pundit Alexi Lalas said in the postgame show. \u201cI guess the silver lining is they got out of the group, but this is not what you expect from a German team. We keep expecting Germany to be Germany. Maybe, in this past decade, Germany has lost sight on what Germany is.\u201d<\/p>\n
ESPN blared a headline on its website Tuesday morning: \u201cIt\u2019s official: Germany are no longer a soccer superpower.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Germans have had the ball go in the back of their own net in every game they\u2019ve played at the World Cup since beating Argentina, 1-0, in the \u201914 Final in Rio. That\u2019s 10 straight games without a clean sheet. In that time Germany have lost World Cup games to Mexico, South Korea, Japan, Ecuador and now 34th-ranked Paraguay.<\/p>\n
Kai Havertz, who scored the tying goal in the second half, was the first to miss his penalty and put the men in black, red and gold in peril.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe had very big plans for this World Cup. It\u2019s very difficult to disappoint again,\u201d Havertz, the veteran Arsenal star, said.<\/p>\n
In looking back, even though Germany advanced as group winners here in this super-sized 48-team North American World Cup, this was a failure of a tournament for Julian Nagelsmann\u2019s squad.<\/p>\n
The 7-1 win over tiny Curacao \u2014 there is that scoreline again \u2014 in the opener no longer looks so impressive. Nor does the come-from-behind win over the Ivory Coast. And certainly not the performance against Ecuador in a 2-1 defeat here in our backyard \u2014 at the Meadlowlands \u2014 when the Nagelsmann and his players couldn\u2019t seem to get on the same page on if they had actually played to win.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou talk about expectations: It is 11 or 12 years and we have come up short,\u201d Nagelsmann said. \u201cIt\u2019s not enough for German football.\u201d<\/p>\n
Germany could pass the ball around the park for hours, but the slow build up simply didn\u2019t result in enough pressure. Not enough dangerous scoring chances in the final third. The squad lacked a sense of urgency from the start on Monday.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe blew it,\u201d team captain Joshua Kimmich told reporters after.<\/p>\n
\u201cAs a child, when you watched the national team during tournaments, it was always semifinals, finals, or world champions. There was always lots of success. You grew up with that,\u201d Kimmich said in blunt quotes distributed by the German Press Agency (dpa).<\/p>\n
\u201cThe gods knew,\u201d world-class writer Wright Thompson wrote for ESPN<\/a> as he described the scenes in Rio during and after Brazil\u2019s national horror from that July day when the Germans ran circles around the greatest soccer-playing country this world has ever known.<\/p>\n\u201cA heavy winter thunderstorm in Rio de Janeiro is an unusual and portentous thing,\u201d Thompson wrote.<\/p>\n
Now the dark clouds hang over German soccer as the faithful from Munich to Berlin, and all points in between, try to make sense of what has happened to the mighty national team since that day.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Did Germany anger the soccer gods when they ran up the score on Brazil 7-1 in the 2014…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":46046,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[387,5,754,362,139,3496,39004,284],"class_list":["post-46045","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-germany","tag-brazil","tag-germany","tag-havertz","tag-manuel-neuer","tag-nagelsmann","tag-paraguay","tag-penalty-kicks","tag-world-cup"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46045","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=46045"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46045\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/46046"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=46045"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=46045"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=46045"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}