By Eike Zwicker,
The Germans defeat Uruguay in a thrilling game 3:2
The coach of the German selection changed his team on five positions; these modifications had a lot of reasons, for example Philipp Lahm suffered a flu and Tim Wiese, Miroslav Klose and Lukas Podolski had injury problems. Despite the big change, the German squad began with nice offensive soccer, as a result of that, the Germans created some promising chances, but Thomas Müller stood offside and Arne Friedrich slammed a header against the crossbar. But after a while Müller shot the first goal of the game with a tap-in after a long-range shot of Bastian Schweinsteiger (19th). First it seemed to be, that the “Celeste” could not respond the lead, but then everything went very quickly, Schweinsteiger lost the ball, Suarez passed to Cavani, and he tied the score (28th). Hereinafter the German team tried to create their game through Özil, but they failed to develop further chances due to the massive defensive of Uruguay.
Without any changes the game continued in the second half. The German selection had definitely more ball contact, but they could not take advantage to create chances. The former World Cup winner of 1930 demonstrated the young German team, how to create promising chances, however they failed to score with a double chance of Cavani and Suarez, a short time later Diego Forlan scored his fifth goal in the current World Cup with a nice volley to a 2:1 lead for Uruguay (51th). On the other hand the German squad took advantage of a mistake of Uruguay’s goalkeeper, with the outcome that Marcel Jansen tied the game with a header (56th). Now it was time for chances on both sides. Finally Khedira scored the decisive goal, when he headed the ball into the net after a corner (82th).
Overall, it is a convincing World Cup performance from the young German squad with two amazing victories against England (4:1!) and Argentina (4:0!).
Line-up:
Butt – Boateng – Mertesacker – Friedrich – Aogo – Khedira – Schweinsteiger – Müller – Özil – Jansen – Cacau
Substitutes:
73th Kießling for Cacau
81th Kroos for Jansen
90th Tasci for Özil
Bench:
Neuer, Badstuber, Trochowski, Marin, Klose, Gomez and Podolski
