{"id":770483,"date":"2026-06-30T19:07:10","date_gmt":"2026-06-30T19:07:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/770483\/"},"modified":"2026-06-30T19:07:10","modified_gmt":"2026-06-30T19:07:10","slug":"kroos-germanys-world-cup-hopes-rest-on-jamal-musiala-florian-wirtz","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/770483\/","title":{"rendered":"Kroos: Germany\u2019s World Cup hopes rest on Jamal Musiala, Florian Wirtz"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"duet--article--dangerously-set-cms-markup duet--article--standard-paragraph _1upudxki _174s0un1 _174s0un0 _1mt21p01\">Germany advanced to the Round of 32 at the 2026 World Cup, but the loss to Ecuador in the final group match sparked concerns that Germany was ill-prepared for a deep run in the tournament.<\/p>\n<p class=\"duet--article--dangerously-set-cms-markup duet--article--standard-paragraph _1upudxki _174s0un1 _174s0un0 _1mt21p01\">Those concerns would ring true after the Germans were ousted from the tourney by Paraguay on penalties. Former World Cup winner Toni Kroos feared an early exit from the World Cup for the national soccer team unless two conditions were met \u2014 and clearly they were not.<\/p>\n<p class=\"duet--article--dangerously-set-cms-markup duet--article--standard-paragraph _1upudxki _174s0un1 _174s0un0 _1mt21p01\">\u201cIt has to be a dream to play against us\u2014we need to be able to defend well and make life difficult for our opponents. We\u2019re not doing that,\u201d Kroos stressed on his World Cup show with his brother Felix (via <a href=\"https:\/\/sport.sky.de\/fussball\/artikel\/toni-kroos-und-lukas-podolski-ueben-kritik-am-dfb-team\/13558215\/34130\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">Sky Sports Germany<\/a>). \u201cWe need Musiala and Wirtz in top form\u2014which we don\u2019t have right now. If neither of these things changes, it won\u2019t last much longer.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"duet--article--dangerously-set-cms-markup duet--article--standard-paragraph _1upudxki _174s0un1 _174s0un0 _1mt21p01\">As it turned out, it did not.<\/p>\n<p class=\"duet--article--dangerously-set-cms-markup duet--article--standard-paragraph _1upudxki _174s0un1 _174s0un0 _1mt21p01\">There is no doubt that Musiala and Wirtz are two of Germany\u2019s brightest talents, but one is coming off a lengthy injury and the other is coming off a disastrous club season. Both players are knocked out of rhythm and so far, Julian Nagelsmann has been unable to get them to click, nor has he provided stability at the national team.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Germany advanced to the Round of 32 at the 2026 World Cup, but the loss to Ecuador in&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":770484,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[563],"tags":[64,63,596,130440,85],"class_list":["post-770483","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-football","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-football","tag-german-national-team-and-international-soccer","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/770483","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=770483"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/770483\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/770484"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=770483"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=770483"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=770483"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}