Emmet Malone profiles Germany's Joachim Loew who successfully scaled the management ladder.
Steve Staunton's admission yesterday he has not spoken with Bobby Robson since prior to his adviser undergoing surgery to remove a brain tumour last week provided a stark reminder of the fact it is not just on the pitch that the Germans are likely to wield superior know-how this evening.
The 37-year-old Dundalk man is still learning the ropes at this level while most of those he has appointed to his back-room team share his inexperience of high-level management. Robson's expertise, one suspects, might never have proven more precious than in Stuttgart this evening.
Joachim Loew has, in contrast, quietly and successfully scaled the management ladder starting while he was still a Bundesliga player by coaching a youth team at Winterthur. A brief spell in the lower divisions was then followed by an assistant manager's posting in Stuttgart where he took over VfB's top job a decade ago and enjoyed a successful spell with the club which won the cup during his first season in charge and reached the final of the Cup Winners' Cup only to be beaten by Chelsea 12 months later.
By the time he decided to accept the offer of a job as assistant to Jurgen Klinsmann with the national team he had been in charge of six big teams in four different countries.
"What you have to understand," says Andreas Lesch, football editor with the daily paper, Berliner Zeitung, "is that Klinsmann completely changed the way that the national team was run. He brought in experts to do absolutely everything, specialists in their own field who could improve something about the way the team was prepared or developed.
"Loew was effectively his football expert, the man who knew all about working with players on the training pitch, about analysing other teams, working out the tactics best suited to playing them and then instructing the players on what was expected of them. In the background there was always Klinsmann overseeing things but gradually it became apparent to people outside of the team how important Loew was to making the team play well and by the end of the World Cup he was definitely seen as one of the heroes of Germany's success."
Klinsmann publicly acknowledged the importance of Loew's role, repeatedly observing that, "he is not my assistant at all, rather he is a partner who has a specific and hugely important area of responsibility".
While Loew won widespread acclaim for his part in revitalising the national team he was not universally popular within it and when Klinsmann departed in the wake of the third-place finish, Michael Ballack made no secret of his desire to see somebody else get the job.
The German football federation, though, took only a week to promote him to the main coach's job. Given how central he was to all that went on before it is hardly surprising that so little has changed since he took on the top job. He is lucky to have inherited a young and improving group of players whose team spirit was fostered during the dark days of the media assault that accompanied a string of poor results last year. And he has taken the helm at a time when they are on a particular high as a result of the subsequent third-place finish during the summer.
While Ballack and Torsten Frings provide the enormously solid base upon which this team is constructed, many of the others claimed star status for themselves during the summer, amongst them Miroslav Klose who claimed the competition's Golden Boot and Lukas Podolsky who was voted its best young player.
The German supporters and media, however, still remain to be entirely convinced that Loew is a really great leader rather than a rather brilliant technician and so there is a good deal riding for the new man in this, his first competitive outing since taking charge.
His preparations have been hampered by injuries to no fewer than four of his best central defenders but three of the back four that will start this evening - Arne Friedrich, Phillip Lahm and Marcell Jansen - are familiar faces within the team set-up while the fourth - Manuel Friedrich - did well on his debut against Sweden last month.
The Germans won that game 3-0 with Klose scoring twice but Loew insisted yesterday there was last-minute work still to be done with the defence to address shortcomings he had seen during the game.
"Not everything went exactly to plan on the night, but we have a lot of faith in the players and we are confident that they will do well together in this match," the 41-year-old said at a press conference yesterday.
Loew expects Germany will have to cope with a succession of long and high balls, which is an attitude that seems a little harsh on the Irish as Staunton will look to his wide men to get into positions to deliver something a little more threatening.
Though he has happy memories of the place himself, tonight's venue has not actually been the happiest of hunting grounds for the Germans who lost four straight international games there over seven years before beating Portugal in the World Cup third-place play-off game.
It's worth noting, though, that the victors were France, Brazil, Argentina and Italy.
Staunton's reputation would doubtless soar at his opposite number's expense if he could somehow engineer the win that would add Ireland's name to a list like that but Loew expressed quiet confidence yesterday that the Germans would prevail in which case this game would go down as an early lesson in one Irishman's education that is clearly still ongoing.
June 2002 WC (Ibaraki) Drew 1-1
May 1994 Friendly Hanover Won 2-0
Sept 1989 Friendly Lansdowne Road Drew 1-1
May 1981 Friendly Bremen Lost 0-3 (*)
May 1979 Friendly Lansdowne Road Lost 1-3
March 1975 Friendly Dalymount Park Won 1-0 (*)
May 1970 Friendly Berlin Lost 1-2
May 1966 Friendly Dalymount Park Lost 0-4
May 1960 Friendly Dusseldorf Won 1-0
Nov 1956 Friendly Dalymount Park Won 3-0
May 1955 Friendly Hamburg Lost 1-2
May 1952 Friendly Cologne Lost 0-3
Oct 1951 Friendly Dalymount Park Won 3-2
May 1939 Friendly Bremen Drew 1-1
Oct 1936 Friendly Dalymount Park Won 5-2
May 1935 Friendly Dortmund Lost 1-3
* = Germany fielded a B team
