Today’s 3-1 victory over Portugal in the World Cup match for 3rd place was the last of 7 games played by the German national team in a remarkable four week period.<\/p>\n
Once again, German fans cheered their team enthusiastically with plenty of flag-waving and party spirit. In addition to the 52,000 fans in the Gottlieb-Daimler stadium in Stuttgart, thousands of fans crowded the public viewing areas all over Germany. Nearly one million of them were in Berlin at the Brandenburg Gate watching the game.<\/p>\n
Oliver "King" Kahn, the 2002 World Cup MVP who was demoted to reserve goalie before the tournament, started his only 2006 World Cup game and made a couple of spectacular saves. He announced his retirement from the national team right after the final whistle.<\/p>\n
Thousands of fans are expected to greet the 3rd place German team tomorrow in Berlin. In a non-commercial show of support, thousands of "Keep Klinsmann" t-shirts are being sold at cost in support of Jürgen Klinsmann, the former German soccer star who has coached the German team for the last two years. Klinsmann, who lives in California with his American wife, was subjected to a lot of criticism before the tournament. Now everyone loves a winner.<\/p>\n
Germany lost only one game during the tournament, the semi-final match against Italy, where the first goal was not scored until the last minute of the 2nd overtime period. The game was played on July 4th, a date that has positive vibes for German soccer fans. 52 years earlier on the same day, in a match called the "miracle of Bern"<\/a>, Germany won its first of 3 World Cup championships.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Today’s 3-1 victory over Portugal in the World Cup match for 3rd place was the last of 7 games played by the German national team in a remarkable four week period.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-96","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-life-in-europe"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ucog.org\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/96","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ucog.org\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ucog.org\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ucog.org\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ucog.org\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=96"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/ucog.org\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/96\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ucog.org\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=96"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ucog.org\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=96"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ucog.org\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=96"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}