An unbelievably boring and uninspiring night for Welsh fans as Germany won 2-0 at a canter, treating the game almost as if it were a training session. Without question, Germany are one of the very best nations in the world and should be expected to beat Wales perhaps as often as 9 times out of 10 but you also expect our boys in red to create a few scares, show their passion and go down fighting. I came away feeling none of those at all. This was piss poor, not even worth trying to defend it.
If Mark Hughes was the manager and Toshack, our current manager, was still a tv pundit, then Tosh himself would be the first in line to slaughter this performance. He knows it too. We know a few stars choose not to be involved and Wales were further rocked as Craig Bellamy was forced to drop out before kick-off (due to his daughter being ill in hospital) but Germany had several key absentees too and how can anyone even begin to defend Tosh's bland and negative 5-4-1 tactic which often saw us overrun in midfield and left Freddie Eastwood condemned to being a spectator.
Most criminally and depressingly, the outstanding German #7, Bastian Schweinsteiger, was allowed to boss the entire game from start to finish. Welsh fans could appreciate he is an outstanding talent as well as many of his team-mates but can rarely recall one man influencing an entire match to that extent, but what an easy game it is when nobody challenges you, closes you down, lets you know they're on your case and puts themselves about. Cardiff City's Steve McPhail must have looked at that and cursed. He often looks highly impressive for Cardiff but it's always a matter of time before he's closed down or the victim of roughhouse challenges. Some of the Welsh fans were closer to Schweinsteiger than Welsh players!
As for as tonight goes, there's few Welsh positives - only those in despair will find any worthy ones - and plenty of negatives. Jens Lehmann was another who must have had one of the easiest nights of his career, any of us could have kept a clean sheet for Germany. He had one very simple late stop from a speculative Ricketts shot late on straight at him.
Tosh finally woke up to 4-4-2 second half as Earnie came on and tried his hardest but there was no spark between Eastwood and himself but the game was killed altogether on the hour as Miroslav Klose got his second at corner to go with his just as simple opener on 5 minutes. The sight of Jason Koumas, who had a poor game but so did the rest, departing for an early substitution marching straight down the tunnel probably spoke volumes about the morale and passion with our national team, at present.
Only 25,000 bother to support Wales playing world class opposition on a perfect day. After this evidence, we'll do very well to even see that sort of crowd again in the foreseeable future.
BBC match report appears here:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/football/league_of_wales/6975038.stm
Tosh's reaction is here:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/football/league_of_wales/6984854.stm
My photos appear here:
http://tinyurl.com/26ytqe
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