Football: DFB international match: Without Popp, Klara Bühl has to lead the DFB team

There were two scenes in Linz that illustrated the entire range of fluctuations among German footballers. Starring Klara Bühl: Once she showed with her arms outstretched that she no longer knew where to pass the ball. Shortly afterwards, the attacker stood up and demonstratively clapped her hands. Like the entire team, Bühl also managed to turn the corner just in time. Ultimately, their brace in the European Championship qualifier against Austria (3:2) was intended to avert an embarrassing defeat.

In the home game against Iceland this Tuesday (6.10 p.m./ZDF), the 47-time national player believes that a proper attitude is the order of the day. »I actually don’t want to resort to the mentality that we’re going to play another game that often. Every player should perhaps ask themselves where their head was.” The 23-year-old wants to “switch into attack mode from the start” and was not really satisfied with her overall performance in Upper Austria. From there she even brought the “Player of the Game” award with her to Aachen.

Around 15,000 fans are expected at the Tivoli, where the men’s team from Alemannia, which is leading in the Regionalliga West, is currently enjoying huge popularity. The German footballers should please continue in this maelstrom. “We want to continue on this path,” demands Horst Hrubesch. »We said that we have six games in preparation for the Olympics. That’s why I hope that this time we’ll get into the game right from the start.” But to do that you have to “invest everything you have.”

The national coach would also like to see a better management structure in front of his successor Christian Wück, who wants to sit in the stands as an observer for the first time: “We have to make sure that we don’t just have one, or two or three, but five, six, seven We have people who take responsibility when things don’t go well.” With her footballing qualities, Klara Bühl, who will soon be 73, definitely belongs to this group. Especially when strike partner Alexandra Popp is missing – and perhaps resigns after the Olympic Games (July 24th to August 11th) – the Black Forest native, who trained at SC Freiburg and moved to FC Bayern in 2020, will be even more important.

At the 2023 World Cup, Bühl was mostly publicly reduced to the mascot “Waru” that she created. Cute anyway, but just knitting a lucky charm is certainly not enough. In Australia, Bühl was also pretty off track because against Colombia (1:2) and South Korea (1:1) the attacking game was lost in high balls to Popp. Nevertheless, the fans voted the down-to-earth Bühl as “National Player of the Year 2023” by a wide margin. She proved that she deserves such awards last Friday with her international goals 21 and 22. At 1:2, she humourlessly smashed the ball into the net with her right hand, “at that moment it was pure will, because of course that frustrates me too, if you have no duels, hardly any crosses, few contacts.” When the score was 2-2, she completed a great combination with her left that was unstoppable and into the far corner.

Afterwards, she also puzzled over the two completely different faces: “We just don’t have the consistency yet. You can see in phases that the quality is there. Maybe it has something to do with conviction, with self-confidence.” This thesis is supported by the fact that she has been delivering consistently for weeks in the Bayern jersey in a dream storm with Lea Schüller and Pernille Harder: The championship seems to be a formality, the final of the DFB Cup against the VfL Wolfsburg on May 9th in Cologne even gives the Munich team the option of the first double in the club’s history.

But for now the focus is on the challenge against Iceland, which has good memories for Bühl. When the DFB women made a mistake in the first game after the World Cup disaster at the start of the Nations League in Denmark, the German team was under a lot of pressure against this opponent in Bochum at the end of September. In the end, the people in the Ruhr Stadium almost euphorically celebrated a 4-0 triumph, to which Klara Bühl had contributed two goals. Of course, the “Player of the Game” award also went to her back then.

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