For the third World Cup in a row, Germany are out before the last 16.
For the first time in World Cup history, Germany lose a penalty shoot-out.
For the first time in this World Cup – and with all due respect to Uruguay – one of the big guns has gone.
This was a disaster for Germany. A humiliating outcome to a disastrous performance in which they appeared to be caught entirely by surprise to see Paraguay do the most obvious thing imaginable.
We shouldn’t be too harsh. It was perhaps no surprise Germany made a slow start to the game. The thing you have to remember about Germany is that these lads just aren’t used to playing World Cup knockout games. They hadn’t played in one in 12 years, a time so long ago that nobody can now remember what game that even was.
Don’t try looking it up, records no longer exist.
But a pattern soon emerged, one that would remain largely intact for the next 120 minutes. Germany would lumber forward to attack with an almost sarcastic absence of wit or invention, before a Jose Canale clearance would find its way to a Jonathan Tah or sometimes even a Manuel Neuer 80-odd yards away and the whole laborious process would being once again.
We’re oversimplifying things, of course. Sometimes it was a Gustavo Gomez clearance. Sometimes Damian Bobadilla. Let it never be said that Paraguay lack range.
But this was Canale’s day. He made 15 clearances in an outrageous display of elite bus-parking. That was three times as many clearances as passes he completed across 120 minutes of sheer relentless Thou Shalt Not Pass refusal to listen to reason. Those five completed passes also matched his total number of completed tackles. Proper football, this.
So of course he was the man to step up and score the decisive penalty in an absurd shoot-out in which Paraguay had already missed two match darts with their fourth and fifth attempts. Kai Havertz and Nick Woltemade both missed in pitifully (yet, in this team, apt) weak fashion for Germany, whose last remaining piece of major-tournament aura is now lost.
Neither Havertz nor Woltemade extended Paraguay’s other hero, goalkeeper Orlando Gill, to anywhere near the extremities of his six-foot-six frame to keep out their efforts. Woltemade’s effort in particular was so guilelessly telegraphed that watching in real time you felt sure it had to be a bluff. But no, he really did just kick it not very hard at the direct spot his entire run-up and approach suggested he would target.
It was a bold strategy and it did not pay off for him.
Even more maddening when it comes from a player we all know has a flawless Shearer-Kane top-bins sweep across the body in his penalty-taking locker.
Germany appeared doomed after Woltemade’s miss but there was still time for more nonsense in what became one of the great World Cup shoot-outs and truly signals the arrival of the knockout stage in earnest.
Antonio Sanabria and Fabian Balbuena – who was brought on in the final minute of extra-time for the express purpose of taking the final penalty of the five for Paraguay – both stood over chances to win the tie. Both failed.
But then Jonathan Tah produced a mirror image of Gabriel Magalhaes’ Champions League final effort, and up stepped Canale – as he had time and again across 120 minutes of toil – to do what his country required of him.
This was a monumental effort from a side who saw only one way to get through this game and committed themselves entirely to the bit. They deserve this moment.
And really, apart from a 15-minute spell after half-time in which Germany played with a bit of wit and bit of zip and started actually trying to get the ball into dangerous areas with some alacrity and duly equalised, it was all too easy.
Germany could easily have got through here, obviously. They dominated the ball, territory and chances. But there was still a sense of ‘So what?’ to it all. There was an odd lack of tension about seeing them fall. If they’d got through this game, they’d still have lost another one somewhere down the line. It’s almost certainly France next for Paraguay, after all.
Germany just aren’t very good. They will complain and with some justification that the unfortunate Tah, who would later have to watch his penalty sailing high into the New England sky, could and should have instead been hailed as Germany’s saviour after heading home from a corner in extra-time.
VAR got involved for the softest of fouls on the goalkeeper, one for which even Gill himself barely appealed after failing to get back to his feet to prevent Tah’s header evading him after a clever back-post run took him into space.
It shouldn’t have been disallowed. But good to see VAR make a welcome shift towards a preference for the funniest possible outcome over a fussy insistence on following ‘The Laws’.
Germany deserved no more than they got. They were just so deeply, distressingly ponderous. Their group-stage exits in 2018 and 2022 were bad, but they had end-of-an-era vibes to them. This was supposed to be the next generation.
It still looked a lot like the old generation. Just with an even less mobile Joshua Kimmich and Manuel Neuer approaching a point of caricature.
Leroy Sane is still starting on the wing for them, and that is not something a potential World Cup-winning team can be tolerating. In a game his team dominated in terms of possession and territory, Sane offered less than nothing. It’s a demise that is painful to watch.
But he was far from alone. Supersub Denis Undav was a wholly ineffective starter, and Germany’s gameplan really did seem to stretch little further than trusting that Havertz or at a push Florian Wirtz would eventually do enough of something to save the team from themselves.
Sure enough, that pair combined for the equaliser that stood out specifically because its combination of whipped cross and clever header was so different in every way to almost everything that had come before and, more baffling still, the majority of what was to follow.
And it was still good enough only for an equaliser, Germany having contrived to hand Julio Enciso – possibly the smallest man on the pitch – the freedom of their penalty area to head home late in the first half.
That a team who won their opening group game 7-1 can be eliminated a fortnight later by one who went down 4-1 in their opener is one of the joys of knockout tournament football, but even before the result was finalised here it was impossible to see either of those games as anything but anomalies.
The truth is there is nothing to lament in Germany’s absence from the remainder of this tournament. They had so little to offer anyway and if it is indeed France next for Paraguay then we’re far more interested in watching how France cope with the questions Paraguay ask than in the facile 2-0 win they’d have managed against this German side.
France, of course, are the one recent winner of the World Cup to avoid The Curse. They at least made it to the final in 2022 after victory in 2018. All of Italy (2006), Spain (2010) and Germany (2014) are still awaiting their first knockout win at a World Cup since last lifting the trophy.
It’s a ridiculous stat. And makes Spain v Austria in a few days’ time suddenly look a whole lot more interesting. And, technically, Argentina v Cape Verde.
