Jurgen hits trouble already

While captaining his country to their last major championship triumph, at Euro 96, Klinsmann was a signatory to a letter to Beckenbauer, urging him to try to stop the dropped Lothar Matthaus constantly having a go at the team.

It seemed as if it would be the last episode in one of German football’s great personality clashes — the prickly, arrogant Matthaus versus the too-good-to-be-true ‘Golden Bomber’ Klinsmann.

Wrong. Matthaus, who’s been doing a decent job as Hungary coach and even inflicted a pre-Euro 2004 defeat on Voller’s team, had clearly coveted the job after Ottmar Hitzfeld and Otto Rehhagel turned it down. By the tone
of Matthaus’s comments in Sport Bild yesterday, the thought of losing out to an old sparring partner who’s only been doing PR work in the US has clearly enraged him.

Suggesting he’d only got the job through political cronyism — Klinsmann knows DFB president Gerhard Mayer-Vorfelder from their days at Stuttgart — Matthaus also poured scorn on the new coach’s suggestion that it would take a decade of
implementing new structures to really change the domestic game.

"Klinsmann is already looking for an excuse,” wrote Matthaus. “If you’re talking about 10 years — and 2006 is a disaster — you can then quietly say ‘I told you that it wouldn’t work out so quickly’.”

To be fair to Matthaus, these fears are also widely held in Germany. There is much goodwill towards the old charmer Klinsmann — and certainly a nation would rather have his bright, optimistic face than sourpuss Matthaus’s — but much
bemusement too that a bloke who just a few weeks ago was calling the DFB’s image “pitiful” should now be so keen to riding to their rescue.

One poll this week reckoned only 23 per cent of Germans felt he was the right
man for the job, suggesting they shared Hamburg coach Klaus Toppmoller’s fears that he was just not experienced enough. “We’ll see how it goes,” was hardly a
ringing endorsement from the current captain, Oliver Kahn, either.

They probably wonder about the commitment of a man who, when I asked him in Lisbon last month whether he would ever fancy returning to big-time football in Europe, just responded “no” because he so enjoyed the anonymity of life with his family in Los Angeles.

Only one job, one World Cup dream, apparently, was big enough to tempt him back. Tomorrow, Klinsmann turns 40 and after all the fun and games of this week he probably feels about 50. Yet, more than anything else, a nation is willing him on because after so many others refused to touch a job that’s these days seen as a poisoned chalice, they appreciate someone with the guts to really dive for it.