Florian Wirtz came short for the corner on the left. After Serge Gnabry obligingly passed to him, the Liverpool forward shifted slightly infield and looked up. Spotting something he liked, he wrapped his right foot around the ball and sent it fizzing into the box.
It swerved and it dipped, flying over the defence, then the outstretched hand of the goalkeeper, and fell just enough to kiss the crossbar on its way into the net. Leroy Sane raised his arms. Jonathan Tah put his hands on his head in disbelief. Wirtz turned away, an indifferent look on his face, as if to say, “Yeah, and what of it? No big deal.”
So did he mean it? Was it a brilliant piece of opportunistic skill, a perfect combination of power and accuracy? Or was it an overhit cross, a fluke masquerading as a banger?
Erm, well…
“I’d be lying if I said I meant it to go exactly there,” Wirtz said after the game, “but I’ll take it.”
To a point, it didn’t matter too much whether Wirtz meant it or not. The goal was a garnish to a brilliant performance in Germany’s 4-3 win against Switzerland, the 22-year-old having a hand in all four goals in what was a surprisingly action-packed friendly in Basel.
By that point, Wirtz had already notched up two assists, one with a not dissimilar ball to the far post — this one deliberately finding Tah’s head rather than accidentally ending up in the top corner — the other a terrific defence-splitting pass that Gnabry lifted over Swiss ’keeper Gregor Kobel. Later, he would score a second goal of his own, intentionally finding the top corner this time, from the edge of the box.
Florian Wirtz scores his second goal and Germany’s fourth against Switzerland (Alexander Hassenstein/Getty Images)
“That was probably my best international match,” Wirtz said, and while there are the obvious caveats about the status of this game — a friendly that many of those on the pitch seemed to spend desperately trying not to get injured — it was encouraging for Germany, for more reasons than one.
This is a German team surrounded by uncertainty. The summer’s World Cup will be the first tournament in a generation without a clutch of legends who retired after Euro 2024. The last time Germany went into a tournament without any of Manuel Neuer, Toni Kroos, Ilkay Gundogan and Thomas Muller was Euro 2008, which is almost two decades of reassurance: whatever the rest of the team looked like, they would always have that solid spine.
They’re all gone now, and this still feels like a side figuring itself out. How convincing a replacement for Neuer is the 35-year-old Oliver Baumann? Should they be worried about the shambolic defending that allowed the Swiss to score three goals in this game? Does Leon Goretzka, on his way out of Bayern Munich, deserve to fill the boots of Kroos? Can Julian Nagelsmann afford to keep using Joshua Kimmich at right-back when there is such a hole in midfield? Should Sane and Gnabry be automatic picks?
Should a place be found for Lennart Karl, the precocious Bayern teenager who made his international debut here with a bright but unspectacular cameo off the bench? Would that be stacking up another problem for when Jamal Musiala returns to fitness, it being hard enough to stuff him and Wirtz into the same team as it is? Will Musiala even be ready for the World Cup, with Nagelsmann this week having remarked that “time is running out” for the playmaker, who has missed most of the season with injury?
Let’s not forget they exited at the group stage of the past two World Cups: the pressure is on to look like Germany again at this one, but with only a few months to go, there are more questions about this team than answers.
And yet, among all of that, something this game underlined was that this German team have a definitive creative leader, the man who can be their new source of reassurance in the absence of the old stalwarts. Wirtz might not yet have the authority and medal collection of a Neuer or Kroos or Muller, but he has the talent, and on the international stage at least, he is now producing reliable results.
Any Liverpool fan watching Wirtz pick the Swiss apart might have been slightly frustrated.
His first season at Anfield, following that £116million ($154m) move from Bayer Leverkusen last summer, has been a little difficult to get a real handle on. He hasn’t been good enough to be described as a definitive success, but at the same time, nowhere near bad enough to be written off as a complete flop. Has he been dragged down by the malaise at Anfield, or has he been a cause of that malaise?
One issue is that his role has changed at various points as Arne Slot has tried to make sense of the players available to him. Sometimes Wirtz has been in his familiar No 10 position, sometimes he has been asked to play wide, sometimes a mixture of the two. It could either be a source of encouragement or further frustration that he performed roughly the same function against Switzerland: he was nominally Germany’s No 10, but found himself on the left a decent amount.
At club level, he’s still working it out, still looking for his place, both literally and figuratively. For his country, he looks like he has found it. There are plenty of things for Germany to be worried about as the World Cup rapidly approaches, but Wirtz will not be one of them.