Australia's many dilemmas seem to echo through history.
Looking back at last year's Women's European Cup runner-up team, the performance in the last six months is like a foggy, seemingly 6:0 beat Morocco's brilliant start, in fact, cover up a lot of hidden problems within the team.
Germany had little to offer in terms of possession, other than passing the ball to top striker Pope, and looked out of their depth against opponents with both intelligence and defense such as Colombia and South Korea.It was a combination of tackling up front and silky midfield play that won the day at Euro 2022, and now those strengths have all but disappeared.
Germany were so eager to let Pope charge forward that they neglected to link up in midfield, leaving players with little room to pass the ball from close range and slowing the pace of the game to a crawl. Oberdorf said bluntly after Thursday's 1-1 draw, "The passing distances were too long."
Coach Fors Tecklenburg's tactical strategy seems to have backfired, with players unhappy with frequent substitutions and substitutions.
Against South Korea, she replaced Bayern Women's midfielder Lina Maguer with Lea Schuler, making Germany's playing style one-dimensional and rigid.
Even more worrying is Germany's sudden switch to a hybrid three-quarterback/four-quarterback defense, a complex system that requires players to be extremely flexible and have a lot of training time, but will be much less effective if they don't have either.
For most of Thursday's game, the players seemed helpless against the formation, with the game filled with nerves and poor first touches. National team director Jyoti Chatzialksyu confessed, "We have a mental block. Perhaps the confidence within the team is not as strong as it is publicly stated."
The recent failures of the German men's national soccer team have sparked a wide-ranging discussion among commentators about the deeper problems of German soccer. Clichéd issues such as youth training, the shortage of street soccer players, and too many extracurricular activities at youth camps have resurfaced.
The Süddeutsche Zeitung even linked the poor performance of the tournament to the poor performance of the economy, writing in an unusual tone of cultural pessimism: "The women's soccer team's exit is a symptom of a country that believes it is far more competitive than it actually is."
However, the real concern is the worrying level of coaching of these two elite teams.
Let's not forget that Forsyth Tecklenburg led Germany's women's soccer team out of the 2019 Women's World Cup quarterfinals, Germany's worst-ever result at the World Cup. Germany's women's soccer team was surprisingly successful at last summer's Euros, but that didn't provide any real encouragement.
In her five years in charge, the German team has only gained one month of overall strength in England (Women's Euro) last year. A period of positive performances during these long years was clearly not enough.
To her credit, Forsyth-Tecklenburg has taken responsibility for the failure, but whether her bosses are prepared to draw the necessary conclusions is not yet known.
So far, the German Football Association (DFB) has remained silent and stood behind her. A harsher evaluation of the work of the national team's head coach is necessary.
Especially at a time when other national teams are rapidly improving, you can't get anywhere by relying on the abilities of individual players and half-baked programs.
