When Hansi Flick reached the cameras late on Thursday evening, he did something strange: he laughed.
Until then, the scenes of good-humored people in the St. Gallen Kybunpark were more likely to have been handled by others.
The Liechtenstein players, unknown faces from unknown communities such as Balzers, Ruggell or Dornbirn, who waved exchanged jerseys, were handed plastic cups with beer from the stands, were exhausted but proudly cheered by their fans.
Christian Kamp
Sports editor.
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At that moment, Flick will suspect that the football nation is actually expecting something different from him, and Lothar Matthäus, the RTL expert, doesn't seem to really know what to do with Flick's laugh either.
But the new national coach has apparently decided to take the 2-0 win against Liechtenstein for what it is: the first win in the first game.
When asked why the German team struggled so hard against the 189th in the world rankings, why everything looked so unimaginative, where all the enthusiasm and courage that was so much talked about, Flick gives balanced, sometimes also a bit evasive answers, but above all he praises the effort and raves about the quality of the training.
"I really can't blame the team," he says.
"It just goes on"
The football coach and former player Flick knows: A few hearty words would do well on television, but it is more important to give the team the right signal. Putting them in the pan after the first game, even if only a little, would probably not be the right thing to do. But he clearly expresses one shortcoming: "It is not a matter of course for this team that they are convinced that they will score goals." sees the nice Mr. Flick on TV.
Football history teaches that his FC Bayern, this insatiable football empire, wasn't built in a day either. Does Flick remember that his first game also ended 2-0 there, against Olympiacos in the Champions League, a tough affair? In any case, on Thursday evening he does not give the impression that he is worried. Not even as if he was particularly dissatisfied. “It just goes on,” he says. "We have a long way to go, and that was the beginning."
The next concrete steps are on this Sunday (8.45 p.m. in the FAZ live ticker for the World Cup qualification and on RTL) in Stuttgart against Armenia and on Wednesday in Reykjavík against Iceland, both in the World Cup qualification. Flick knows: In the interests of the football nation, it would be helpful if his laughter could then also be underpinned by fun football and a few slow-motion games of beautiful goals. Otherwise the spirit of optimism could quickly be over, on which he has worked so resolutely in the past few days.
Monday afternoon, training ground for the Stuttgarter Kickers, Flick's first session with the team. It has rained heavily, large puddles have formed on the field, the balls that the goalkeepers pass to each other are suddenly stopped. At the edge of the square, it goes down a small slope, one or the other reporter slips and now looks as if he himself had goalkeeping training behind him. Flick wants to say a few sentences to the journalists, but the cameras and microphones should stay off, it's about trust, so only this much here: It's about what you can expect from each other and what maybe not, then explains Flick briefly what the training should be about.