News (engl.)

Following the Nations League defeat against Greece in his first home game in charge, Germany head coach Jürgen Klopp and his players talked about the performance at Augsburg’s WWK-Arena. DFB.de have summarised the most important quotes below.

Germany head coach Jürgen Klopp: It’s part of the process. Making lots of changes to the starting XI is my call. It was clear that we wouldn’t be able to break down a team that sat deep. I could’ve lived with not winning, but you can’t lose games like that. The goal was unfortunate, but it fits with the chances that the Greek players had. We didn’t defend the balls as vigilantly as we could have done. In general, it’s down to the fact that we’ve been together for a week and are playing against a side that likes to sit back. We were doing the right things after the interval and then suddenly stopped – as for the reason why, we’ll have to get to the bottom of that. I don’t feel the pressure to deliver results as long as we make the right decisions – anything else is just information.

Joshua Kimmich: It was definitely not a good performance at all. Of course, it was unlucky to lose in that fashion. We struggled to break down the low block – with a little bit of luck, we could’ve found the back of the net, but all in all it was too static. We lacked ideas going forward.

Jonathan Tah: It wasn’t an easy game. To be honest, we simply weren’t good enough. Of course, we had a few chances where we threatened, and if we had used them then the game might’ve looked a bit different. But we couldn’t exploit what they offered us – that they didn’t really press us, that we could’ve actually dominated possession more. At the end of the day, they then had chances to counter, had a few chances themselves and then converted one of them.

Alexander Nübel: We created one or two chances from outside the box, but we hardly had a sniff in the opposition penalty area. We had a lot of possession with little to show for it – they had two chances and one of them went in. We had too few shots on goal and then we found it tricky when the other team sat back.