Toni Kroos returned to play football for Germany. And Germany, more than winning, got tired of playing

This Germany is not the Germany we used to fear, that Germany that was inevitable because it was relentless, the Germany that was a mere matter of time, that team that could see the opponent control operations in possession, until they dared to have more scoring opportunities and appear to be one goal away from defeating this Germany, which always found a way to prevail, so calm and undaunted, and immune, above all unperturbed by other people’s improvements, for decades had this quality welded to its core to the point of a player born in other latitudes having created a cliché about what Germany is in football thanks to a happy phrase that rightly said that in the end Germany wins.

Germany for a long time was what it was for now in this text, an insistent repetition to cloud the judgment on any football field with only the occasional mishap, in 2000 one of them, when a hat-trick by Sérgio Conceição reminded the Germans who are fallible because they are human and eliminated them from a European Championship in the group stage. They reinvented the way to teach kids how to handle a ball, das reboot, they gave it time and in 2014 they were winning a World Cup with a humiliation to the Brazilian hosts included. Germany then boasted, but, shortly afterwards, the team that ultimately won always learned what it was like to lose.

They left the last two World Championships small and eliminated in the group stage, die schande, the shame that the German team felt urged it, it had to change, but the change, this time, is costly. He thought of a solution with Hansi Flick and with him he lost more than he won, then he turned to Julian Nagelsmann and he had lost more than he had won – between them, there were six defeats in 11 games played in 2023 – in the run-up to the visit to Lyon, a trip thorny due to the host it would have, France, which in recent times is threatening to be the football repetition of teams. It would not be ideal to try to return to life against the country’s team with a European final in 2016, a World Cup won in 2018, another final four years later and the same coach for 12 years.

And taking seven seconds to obliterate a trauma in the making is an act that could hardly be more exemplary of German engineering at work.

Therefore, the dying team had the ball in Lyon, in the middle of the field, Haverty played it back and it was the second pass of the game that sent Florian Wirtz into the empty space of the French team, surprised by the suddenness and punished with a inspired by the Bayer Leverkusen youngster’s genius, who performed a monumental effort to score the first goal. So soon, out of the blue and with complete intention, Germany started to win with a shot after two passes and the piece that started a gear that would have German reliability during the next hour and a half was in the late name whose absence from the team coincided with recent hardships.

Geniusly roguish looking at his field while keeping an eye on the French half to, in a flash, turn his body and throw that pass at Wirtz, the foot that touched that ball was Toni Kroos’, three years later it was his again , the midfielder who reappeared with the same boots on, the same blond and static hair, the same calmness in the face of any temporary annoyance that the game momentarily offers him, there orchestrating with three or four touches of the ball in a row at a time, never more than That’s it, the Germanic style of play. Because if Germany had a way of playing before Kroos, this is what they had with him back.

One reception and one pass at a time, short or long, quickly or taking its time, we saw a team submissive to the boots of Toni Kroos, today with the most tattooed arms as the only sign of the passing of the years, now with 34 and seems to dominate the clock, any ball that was addressed to them in Lyon became an impossibility for the lost French, who had their vertigo and haste reduced to insignificance except between the 20th and 30th minutes, when their pride encouraged a reaction . Captain Mbappé came close to scoring twice, the ambidextrous Dembelé, who has kidneys, also shot, putting Germany at ease in the suffering that has characterized their last years.

But, before and after that, the game was German, ostensibly German, dominated by the hundred times that Toni Kroos touched the ball and started passing after pass after pass with which the Germans went to one side of the field. , then the other and returned to the same if necessary to carve out the space they wanted to attack the goal with the patience appreciated by the Real Madrid midfielder.

The goal after seven seconds (the fastest in the history of the German national team) by the shy but technically-fine Florian Wirtz, preceded the zigzagging snake with the ball that is Jamal Musiala, a talent to mark an era, certainly does not lose balls when moved to the right wing, which is Joshua Kimmich and the laborious work of Andrich and even Gündongan, another passing artist pushed into a number 10 role where he ran, pressed, fought and moved without the ball, sacrificing his essence , both deposited in a midfield reformatted to exist in function of the conductor to whom Nagelsmann entrusted the orchestra after his sabbatical period is now over.

If this seemed like a eulogy for a single man, that’s because it is, as far as a collective display so usurping attention can be explained by one player.

In the second half, when Musiala, Wirtz and Havertz gave runs and clearances in the last third of the field to the supremacy that Germany already exercised in the previous two thirds of the pitch, the Germans scored another goal by the Arsenal striker who is not, but it even seemed to be, such was the fluency of the Germanic game that it never got stuck at all. The game would be 0-2 and several others of the visitors’ 15 shots, against France’s nine, which managed three in the last five minutes, came close to increasing the unexpected blow given to an irrelevant France, in which Mbappé seemed to not exist and Tchouaméni, Rabiot and Zäire-Emery looked like apprentice midfielders.

Strolling through pockets of space, a master in the art of discovering how to receive the ball facing the entire field, Toni Kroos was in Lyon experiencing his renaissance, leaving a lesson in how it is possible to be masterful without tricks and showy juggling, but in the domain of constancy, of never making mistakes when doing the simple things in football. We watch the die renaissance based on the simplicity of the reception followed by a pass from someone who touched the ball 143 times and sent it traveling 128 times, hitting 121 of them. For a long, long time now, statistics have been unnecessary accessories for Toni Kroos, a total midfielder, master of time and space who is best understood when he is seen in action, when he is on the field, not when the numbers that are read to him. They will never explain the whole story.

When he was substituted, in the 90th minute, with his disinterested and taciturn air, he left the game as if it were nothing, just looking like another full day at the office. France, already bent by then, reacted through the hands of a few fans sitting in the rows of stands closest to the pitch, who offered to applaud the German player. A simple gesture recognizing the simplicity of a genius.

Germany became Germany again because of Toni Kroos and others and it may not have been in Lyon that the team found itself again. There is plenty of talent, there is a spine that can be extracted and used in the selection of the only team from the five big leagues that has not yet lost this season – central Jonathan Tah, midfielder Robert Andrich and striker Florian Wirtz, all starters, came from Xabi Alonso’s unstoppable Bayer Leverkusen – and a young and bold coach in Julian Nagelsmann who has already proven himself to devise ways to make a team perform. The country will host the European Championship in the summer and, now, it also has the midfielder who is most capable of taking control of a game if given the ball. Toni Kroos returned to play for Germany and Germany returned to play.