According to Alexandra Popp, she consciously didn’t want to think too much about these moments. Everything from “cold stone to complete emotions that bubble out of you” is imaginable. The 33-year-old knew that it would be emotional anyway when, around her 145th and final international match for Germany in Duisburg against Australia, she would once again experience everything that had been part of her life for more than 14 years: arriving at the National team, the training sessions and meetings, the preparations in the dressing room, the walk out of the tunnel into the stadium, the anthem, the speech, the goosebumps.
When the time came, Popp tried to control himself. Tears were only visible during the anthem. She couldn’t completely hide her feelings. Why? She had previously received a large bouquet of flowers and a picture frame with photos from her DFB career. Marina Hegering (42 appearances) and goalkeeper Merle Frohms (52 appearances), who also retired after the Olympic Games this summer, were also presented with these gifts and waved with emotion to the 26,623 spectators. As the two left the pitch, Popp ran to the team, ready for her farewell game at the place where she made her national team debut on February 17, 2010 – “still without body tension and with wobbly knees,” as she recently recalled
Wück’s start as national coach
:Take a risk first
National coach Christian Wück begins his term with a spectacular 4-3 win against England at Wembley Stadium. The bolder new style seems to be well received by the players.
And so the evening had a little more symbolic power than the long-standing, popular captain herself had perhaps wanted in the core element: playing football. Because the game revealed more construction sites in the freshly started upheaval with a new coaching team than at the offensive festival last Friday at Wembley Stadium against England, which Popp had watched on television. After the 4:3 she may have thought to herself: It can be done without me, I can go with peace of mind. After the 1:2 (1:1) against Australia she was perhaps no longer so sure.
National coach Wück remains true to his announcement and rotates in six positions
At least it has been made clear what Christian Wück said into the ZDF microphone after his second international match as national women’s coach: “You shouldn’t forget that we are in the discovery phase. We have some players who have played their first international match and others who haven’t played for a long time.”
The 51-year-old has explicitly declared the end of the year with a total of four international matches in the new constellation to be a test phase. That in itself took pressure off. This had now been brought back in the form of expectations by the national team themselves, precisely because they had performed so courageously, greedily and dynamically at Wembley despite all the innovations. Already at Wück’s debut, the faces of the starting eleven had changed significantly compared to the Olympic bronze medalist – albeit of necessity due to failures. Now the national coach stayed true to his announcement and rotated to six positions; goalkeeper Stina Johannes and midfielder Lisanne Gräwe (both Eintracht Frankfurt), for example, were given their chance from the start.
In terms of sport, Wück understandably wanted to “continue seamlessly where we left off at Wembley”, and that initially worked quite well. At the end of a relay that began with the Australians losing the ball, Selina Cerci scored with a header after just five minutes to make it 1-0. Three minutes later, a shot from left-back Felicitas Rauch hit the post. Klara Bühl might have scored in the 14th minute, but she obviously wanted to give Popp a very personal farewell gift with an assist and passed it into the penalty area. But Popp didn’t get to the ball. It would have been her 68th goal for the national team, only Heidi Mohr (83 goals), who died in 2019, and record national player Birgit Prinz (128) were more successful.
Kyra Cooney-Cross scores the goal of the evening from a good 40 meters
Shortly afterwards the whole stadium stood and applauded, including Wück predecessor Horst Hrubesch. After a quarter of an hour, the Popp era ended. The captain waved to the audience, slipped the armband of her potential successor Giulia Gwinn on the arm and hugged everyone on the team who had stood up for her. “The gap it leaves behind is very large,” said Wück. “Alex, but also Marina and Merle, are leaving big shoes to fill. We have to see that we can close the gap.”
It seemed as if some of the drive to the substitute bench had disappeared with Popp. In the first half there were still opportunities even without Popp and some elements of the premiere could be seen: the courage to move forward, for example. How offensively Wück wants to play was clearly shown a few minutes before the break when right-back Gwinn hit a cross into the Australian penalty area to left-back Rauch, which was almost successful. But the rhythm was lost and mistakes crept in, some of them self-inflicted, some of them provoked. Kyra Cooney-Cross scored the goal of the evening when she surprised Stina Johannes, who was lurking far in front of the goal, from a good 40 meters in the 39th minute. Clare Hunt gave the visitors a 2-1 lead in the 77th minute. “We weren’t really able to deliver our top performance,” said Wück on ZDF. “We knew we had a lot of work to do and we were vindicated.”
Alexandra Popp watched from outside with her tears now dry as her teammates struggled and would have liked to have helped. “I can’t deny that it was fun because we were good at the pressure,” said the striker later in the evening. The timing of their replacement had been discussed and, Popp emphasized, it was extremely important to her that the players now take the next steps to begin a new phase. What was she thinking when she left the field? “It’s a shame, it’s already over” – one of the most influential German footballers was certainly not alone.
