Valid point. Still, a switch to a midfield of five was such an obvious move that Löw had no excuse to not see it coming, adapt the gameplan accordingly and prepare his team in advance to execute it from the get-go.
It was also well-known how dangerous Krasic is and that Badstuber wasn’t suited to deal with him: not agile enough to fight it out man-to-man, not experienced enough to hamper him with positional play and not at all offensive enough to bind or, at the very least, tire Krasic with defensive obligations. And Podolski is generally unaware of dangerous developments in his back.
We had at other places quite some discussion prior to the game about alternatives on the wing; the most obvious one was a duo from Hamburg: Dennis Aogo in defence, Marcel Jansen in offence. They know each other, are defensively a better team and though Jansen isn’t as dangerous as Podolski, Aogo would have supported him more in the forward movement which would have made it far more challenging for the Serbian wing to act offensively (more to the point, Aogo would have burdened Krasic with defence).
The down-side: Although this formation is very interesting, we haven’t played this way before (which is another point against Löw, btw.).
Another option was a transfer from Lahm to the left with the addition of Boateng to the right. Badstuber could have either paused or preferably taken the position of Arne Friedrich as centre-back.
In light of the trigger-happy referee, Boateng might not have been such a great idea: he is an extremely talented defender but also the only German player who managed to see a red card in his debut.
Otoh, he has shown far more discipline in most of his matches than his first appearance in the national team suggested and he wouldn’t have been involved in many tackles anyway. Plus, he could have teamed up with Müller pretty well to provide a constant threat over the right wing. Maybe not as much as Lahm/Müller are capable of but enough to do far more than just neutralize this Serbian wing.
But I fully agree with you that it was annoying to see them stick to the prior tactics even when it became apparent that this was a different match-up. The lack of experience was plain to see.
This had a lot to do with the lopsided shape created by the one dangerous Serbian wing: the positions weren’t perfect anymore for an immediate switch to attack. But the referee might have hampered us even more (though I am not inclined in any way to use him as a scape goat for our lacklustre performance!).
Our play needs rhythm to work well; I am pretty sure the Serbian players were prepared to prevent its emergence with numerous tackles against our passing midfield.
As it turned out, the referee made sure it could not happen, which should have been a plus but his constant whistles (almost every tackle was disrupted) had the same effect: both teams were in constant start-stop-mode for the first thirty minutes but it hurt us more and would have hurt any team that relies on passing rhythm and fast switching positional play, while a more defensive oriented team gets a lot more time due to the intermissions to (re-)arrange its positions.
Still, you’re right, the players weren’t at their best: they should have been able to adapt to the situation more readily and attack far more swiftly – they did neither. At least not when they were still a full team. Once Klose was gone, they sped up and looked far more dangerous than before. Fools.
We fully agree on the idiocy of Löw’s substitutions. He did not just wait too long but chose wrong twofold: he added and more so removed the wrong players.
That the team was still competitive, despite a less than adequate preparation, wrong formation, medocre performance and an unusually poor conversion of chances, gives me hope however. I doubt that so many things will go wrong again.
They desperately missed their two centre-backs. When they come back, they will deploy a much better formation. All in all, Germany has a better team but we will see how the youngsters manage to deal with the pressure of elimination.
This might be one of the matches when we miss the battle-tested, efficient, humourless, old-school German players, the ones who didn’t mind how they played as long as they were winning.
If we don’t make it to the final, I won’t mind if your wish comes true. Otherwise, nah.