When Paul Pogba wanted to demonstrate him, Toni Kroos did what he rarely does: he used his body.

Almost 80 minutes had been played when Pogba and Kroos, the football strategists from France and Germany, faced each other near the corner flag.

They didn't move for a moment as if they were two cowboys in the Wild West just waiting to pull out their revolvers.

Then the duel for the ball began.

Christopher Meltzer

Sports correspondent in Munich.

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    With the first trick, Pogba outwitted Kroos.

    In the second trick he was outwitted by him.

    On the sidelines, Kroos vigorously used his left arm and left foot.

    And when the otherwise famous Pogba crawled on the floor without a ball and Kroos ran away with the ball, the people in Munich, where 14,500 spectators were allowed to come into the arena that evening, got really loud.

    A few seconds later they were quiet again.

    Because Kroos and his colleagues hadn't even made it to the middle line.

    On the way there, the substitute Timo Werner wanted to play the ball to Kroos again, but because he no longer looked at it in front of the pass, he no longer saw in time that it had stopped.

    The ball rolled out of bounds.

    Two important observations

    Two important observations could be made in this scene from the first game of the European Championship in Munich. On the one hand, the Germans really resisted the world champions from France, who are still at the forefront of the football revolution. On the other hand, however, they have almost never been able to push the French into situations in which the French had to defend themselves.

    In the end, the resistance of the German national team was not enough to prevent a false start.

    They lost 0-1 because Mats Hummels had kicked the ball with his shin into their own goal in the 20th minute.

    A misstep that shouldn't be blamed on him (he had to catch the ball in front of Kylian Mbappé), even if he immediately tightened the constellation before the second group game against Portugal on Saturday.

    On the sidelines, Toni Kroos said into the ZDF microphone: "If you lose the first game and have three group games, the pressure is great, we don't need to talk about it."

    Two ways of interpretation

    From a German point of view, there are now two ways to interpret this opening game. The optimistic goes like this: A single goal can be seen against the super athletes from France. Toni Kroos (“We controlled a lot very well”) and Joshua Kimmich (“We had the dominance”), for example, represented this possibility, even though they hit the post from Adrien Rabiot (52nd) and the offside goals from Mbappé (66th) .) and Karim Benzema (88.) downplayed a little too much.

    The pessimistic one goes like this: Contrary to Kroos' analysis ("I think we had a chance to score - no less than the French"), a goal of our own was hardly in sight. What does that mean now? You could perhaps put it this way: unlike after the first World Cup game against Mexico in summer 2018, which was also lost 1-0, there is at least an optimistic interpretation.

    On Tuesday evening, Joachim Löw, the national coach, stood in front of a ZDF camera and addressed the probably greatest flaw of his team: “What we lacked was the penetration in the last third.” In this zone, the attackers Serge Gnabry, Thomas Müller and Kai Havertz usually deal with several French defenders.

    It was the plan, said Löw, to avoid the center and attack on the outside lane, to operate with flanks.

    Once, when Robin Gosens circled the ball from the left into the penalty area, Gnabry, who mainly played in the middle of the storm, shot it just over the goal (54th).

    It was the best German attempt.

    Otherwise the flanks mostly did not reach him.

    That shouldn't come as a surprise either: Gnabry is only 1.76 meters tall.

    If you want to explain the lack of chances, you should look again at the first line-up that Löw came up with in his last tournament with the national team. In defense, he relied on a chain of three or five, in which he divided Joshua Kimmich on the right side. As a result, he was able to summon the ball artists Ilkay Gündogan and Toni Kroos in midfield, but that did not change a basic calculation that Löw will have to face again in preparation for the Portugal game: a player more on the defensive always means one player less Offensive.

    “Nothing happened,” said Löw at the end of the interview. “We have two games in which two games we can straighten everything out.” And even if his team made a different impression than three years ago in Russia, one should at least mention that he believed it back then.