Which made me think (and that’s always dangerous). Why is it that Germany is so frightfully good at (re)organizing their sporting teams and well, sub-optimal when it comes to reorganizing their country? If a German Fußball club starts to sputter and spurt around a bit for a few weeks and, heaven forbid, drops slowly but steadily in the ranking table, that club’s manager will do something about it or he is out of a job. As in: What part of “you’re fired” don’t you understand?

Everybody understands that here. It’s called consensus. We’ll give you a little more time buddy, but we’re measuring it in days not in weeks and the clock just started ticking so make it happen NOW. And in a country world famous for consensus in practically all areas of its “social order”, it is all the more strange that this type of urgency seems to be missing completely when it comes to the government, that is, reform level.

Something happens to the c word on its way up, I guess. It evaporates at higher altitudes. The only thing that any recently elected German government (and opposition) has ever been able to agree about is the need for reform (the r word): Reform of the employment system, reform of the retirement system, reform of the health system, reform of the medical system, reform of the education system, reform of the federal government system itself etc.

And make it happen NOW! Right? No, es hat doch noch Zeit (there will still be enough time for that), it seems. Or so it appears. And this “so it appears” appears to be so regardless of how low the government drops in the ranking table. Perhaps that’s the problem. The government can’t be fired immediately. And besides, the Germans have been world champions so often in the past (see export, industrial innovation, financial power), that nobody here really believes it won’t stay that way in the future. That kind of a Befreiungsschlag can come later. Oder (right)?

And so when Angela Merkel openly supported German coach Jürgen Klinsmann recently, convinced that he and his team were on the right to victory at the World Cup this summer, she seems to have been right on the money. Now they (and maybe she now, or what?) can sit back and relax a bit. They’ve won some breathing space, some more time.

Even if it was done so by beating “so eine Mannschaft” (a team like) the USA - just like they walked all over us at the Winter Olympics too, by the way. The dirt bags.

How about a round of baseball you guys?