Germany’s plans A and B went terribly. Does Jogi Löw have a Plan C?

It seems safe to assume that most teams come into a World Cup with a plan. An idea as to their preferred first team, a tactical shape, and so on. Frankly, it would be irresponsible not to. This is quite a big deal. And we can be doubly sure that Germany will have done all available homework: even when they’re not the best, they’re usually among the most sensible.

But as the famous Prussian military strategist Helmuth von Moltke once said: Ahahahaha, suckers! Where is your precious plan now? Two game into the tournament and Germany, though they’re scrapping, are miles off the map. They may even have lost the map completely. Jogi Löw is squinting up at the stars, trying to remember which end of the Plough points at the North Star, and asking Mats Hummels if his compass is meant to be slowly spinning round like that.

When looking through was hasn’t gone to plan, it’s had not to conclude: pretty much everything, at least a bit. The defence has looked slow, ragged, and dangerously exposed, for midfield has been a yawning chasm of anxious isolation. Sami Khedira looked knackered against Mexico, and Sebastian Rudy, who lasted half an hour against Sweden and might still be bleeding.

On the plus side, Emre Can has been looking very sharp. On the downside, that’s because he’s been wearing a suit and signing for Juventus, several hundred miles from Russia.

The defence and midfield have taken most of the attention, but this has been exacerbated by an odd diffidence in attack. Against Mexico they had plenty of shots but few good chances; against Sweden they were better, but still needed the creaking bones of Mario Gomez to act as a focal point. Timo Werner has been better on the left than as the central striker, and Thomas Müller is looking less space investigator, more cadet. Oh, and Low’s finally jumped aboard the “Mesut Özil is a fraud” bandwagon. The English press always wins in the end.

All of which means that with one game to in the group stage, Germany find themselves in an unusual position. (Almost unheard of, in fact: the last time the failed to get past the first round was 1938.) Even if they do manage to get past a kick-happy Korea, they’ll be limping into the rest of the tournament. The plan failed. The back-up plan failed. The back-up to the back-up nearly failed as well. The squad is a mass of question marks and sad trombone noises.

And so Germany, from Löw down, are going to have to do something they’d probably have preferred to avoid. They’re going to have to improvise. Improvise hard. They’re going to have to make it up, one game at a time, in the hope that something coherent emerges from this extremely talented collection of individuals that look, collectively, like a mess. They have a catalyst: the collective euphoria of that last-minute winner against Sweden. Now they need a new idea.

What that might be isn’t immediately clear, though we suspect that Gomez and Rudy — assuming his nose has dried up — are going to play a lot more football than they were expecting. The dropping of Özil suggests that nobody is safe, although Toni Kroos has probably earned himself another game with that free-kick. Beyond him and Manuel Neuer, though, it’s hard to make an unshakeable case for anybody.

It goes without saying that this is going to be tremendous fun for everybody else. There is great pleasure in watching an excellent team play its excellent game excellently, but there is pleasure too in chaos. These are some of the best players in the world — the defending champions! — and they are off the grid, hacking their way through in the deep bush. If they never make it back, it’s been very funny.

And if they do, it will be an admirable achievement. The last World Cup was testament to the rebooting of German football, and a remarkable strength in depth. If they somehow manage to retain the thing, then it will have been a hard-fought path cut through the chaos, a feat of scrappy survival. And there’s Löw lifting the trophy, his team shattered and remade, a bandana round his head and warpaint smeared across his brow. Well, hopefully warpaint.