Euro 2016: How Germany will try to solve their striker crisis, and whether it matters

After the retirement of Miroslav Klose, Joachim Low is likely to play Mario Gotze up front at the tournament. But is that his biggest headache?

Mario Gotze has struggled to make an impression in the two years since his World Cup final heroics (Getty)

Mario Gotze will always be the man who scored the goal that won the 2014 World Cup but he has done very little since. Mario Gomez is a reliable goal-scorer of a certain level who just helped Besiktas to win the Turkish league. Lukas Podolski is also in Turkey, at Galatasaray, but has been less successful.

It is not a fearsome battery of strikers that Germany will take to France for Euro 2016. It is certainly a long way from the great run of goalscorers they had, all the way from Gerd Muller, through Karl-Heinz Rummenigge, Rudi Voller, Jurgen Klinsmann, Oliver Bierhoff and the rest.

The last of that line was Miroslav Klose, Germany’s leading scorer and the man who played up front at the age of 36 at the 2014 World Cup. But he has retired now and there is no-one to replace him. Joachim Low must answer the same issue that many coaches now face in Europe: how to build a dangerous team without a world-class striker?

Low will be very conscious of the fact that the last European Championship final, in Kiev four years ago, was won by a Spain team with Cesc Fabregas up front. It can be done, if the player given the ‘false nine’ role is clever and selfless enough. But whether Germany will be able to replicate what that Spain team did, and assert themselves as their successors at the top of the international game, is another question.

The likeliest man to start at the top of Loew’s 4-2-3-1 against Ukraine in Lille on Sunday night is Mario Gotze. He played there when Germany beat Hungary 2-0 in Gelsenkirchen last Saturday evening, their last warm-up game before leaving for France. He is a very talented player and, for obvious reasons, one of the most important players in the modern history of the German game. And yet his career has been going backwards ever since he left Borussia Dortmund for Bayern Munich in 2013.

When Bayern activated his €37million release clause just before Pep Guardiola replaced Jupp Heynckes that summer, there was a sense that Gotze would flourish under the incoming coach. Guardiola was, after all, the reason Gotze broke so many hearts by walking out on the club that made him. But the reality of Gotze’s three seasons in Bavaria so far have been fiercely disappointing.

Gotze has suffered with injuries which of course are not his fault but he has failed to raise himself to the tactical level required to play in a Guardiola team. By the end of this season just gone it was very clear that Guardiola did not feel he could count on Gotze. He was left on the bench for all six of Bayern’s Champions League knock-out games this spring. He came on just twice, in both legs against Benfica, for a combined five minutes.

Guardiola said that Gotze should impose himself more on the game and talk to his team-mates. Franz Beckenbauer accused him last summer of exhibiting “the behaviour of a child” and said that it was “time to grow up”. Little this year would suggest that he has. This summer he was voted ‘Absteiger der Saison’ (‘Flop of the season’) by German players in Kicker. Bayern told Gotze he was welcome to find himself a new club this season, but the player has said he wants to stay.

But then Gotze knows what Low wants from him and his movement in front of Julian Draxler, Thomas Mueller and Mesut Ozil may yet be the best solution for Germany. Low has always been fiercely defensive of the player he told to “prove he was better than Lionel Messi” when he sent him on at the Maracana Stadium almost two years ago.

The main alternative to Gotze is Gomez, a veteran of Low’s squads for the 2008, 2010 and 2012 tournament campaigns. He is a powerful and imposing striker, not exactly subtle, and is coming into the tournament after his best club season since his Bayern Munich heyday four years ago. But that excellent season – 26 goals and the ‘Goal King’ title – was in Turkey, not the highest standard of league in Europe. Gomez only went there after two disappointing seasons in Italy, and at 30 years old he is not as sharp as he was when he was plundering Bundesliga goals in his mid-20s.

Then there is Podolski, a curiously permanent presence in the German national side despite failing to make much of an impact on the club game since his second spell at Koln over four years ago. He is still an emphatic finisher with his left foot – he always will be – but is unlikely to stretch teams from the start any more at this level.

Powerful Besiktas striker Mario Gomez is Gotze's main competition for a place up front for Germany (Getty)

The cupboard, then, is rather bare. But so it is for almost every team at the tournament. This is the era of the dearth of European strikers. “The strikers are South American today,” Arsene Wenger said this season. “Europe doesn’t produce strikers any more. We produce good technical players because there are nice pitches out there, before you played in the park where you had to fight.”

Spain, of course, won the last European Championship having decided by the final that Fabregas was a better option up front than the more conventional Fernando Torres or Alvaro Negredo. Fabregas is not quite the same type of player as Gotze but clearly it can be done if the rest of the team is good enough. This Germany team have been working without an old-fashioned striker for the last two years, at least.

That is why there is another theory in Germany this week, that the striking problems of the team will not be what hold them back from completing the double. Klose is not the only experienced player who retired after the World Cup triumph in Brazil. They also lost Philipp Lahm, their inspirational captain and a player who performed far better for Guardiola at Bayern than Gotze did.

With no Lahm, this Germany team is desperately short of specialist full-backs and their defence could be exposed by the first serious team that they face. Jonas Hector of Koln is yet to look fully ready at left-back while at right-back Low is likely to use Benedikt Howedes or Joshua Kimmich, neither of them natural in the role.

That defensive stability that was a given of Germany teams for years has gone, even with Manuel Neuer still in goal. Low may even move to a three-man defence if he feels it would give him more security. If they run into a Belgium or France team in the knock-out rounds in full flight, Gotze’s difficult few years at Bayern could be the least of their worries.