Playboy joins German circus

The German national side has long since shed its reputation for grey efficiency on the pitch and the circus surrounding Joachim Löw’s squad as they count down to their opening game at Euro 2012 is proving to be just as colourful.

Yesterday, deep in the wooded suburbs between Sopot and Gdansk, players and management faced questions on matters as varied as Playboy models, Ukrainian politics and Angela Merkel and they did it all without batting an eye.

Just another day in Das Big Brother-Haus.

Nothing, it seems, is too insignificant to be of interest when it comes to the ‘Deutsche Mannschaft’, not even the width of their bedroom walls or the quality of light which some fear may be preventing their heroes from getting the required amount of shut-eye.

“I sleep very well,” goalkeeper Manuel Neuer said in a reassuring drone. “You can put the blinds down and all of us have a cosy and comfortable room.

“It’s all single rooms so we don’t share with team-mates and I have heard no complaints from anyone.”

Questions as to the composition of their defence for Saturday’s Group B meeting with Portugal have commandeered the majority of column inches but Bastien Schweinsteiger and Jerome Boateng have ensured coverage spanning front pages and back.

Schweinsteiger’s sin was to take a break at an €800-a-night spa resort in Capri recently while recovering from injury. Boateng spent part of the night in an €80-a-night airport hotel room with Playboy model Gina-Lisa Lohfink hours before the team departed for Poland.

One can only imagine the fun the English red tops would have with similar ingredients were one of Roy Hodgson’s boys ones under those microscopes but the appetite to grill team manager Oliver Bierhoff extended to just one question.

Journalists seemed more concerned with the boots on the players’ feet or what Per Mertesacker thought of the alleged racism among football fans in Ukraine but then the German media is a sizeable beast and its needs are many and varied.

More than 500 German media have been accredited for the tournament, almost 10 times that of their Irish counterparts in the fourth estate, and all are housed day after day in a carpeted press centre replete with free McCafe goodies, Coca-Cola and a fussball table.

The Deutsche Fussball Bund has spared no expense on those covering a team that will share Ireland’s qualifying group for the 2014 World Cup but they do so in the knowledge that all the free muffins in Poland won’t spare them if they fail to triumph in Kiev.

That much was evident in the suburb of Oliwa yesterday afternoon as a succession of journalists served up loaded questions on the premise that the current team is superior to that which reached the final in 2008 and a World Cup semi in South Africa.

“We are a more mature team now,” said Neuer. “We know each other much better now and there is a good understanding between everyone. Of course we want to win that trophy but at the beginning we should eat humble pie and just take things as they come.”

One game at a time: it’s a cliché we have come to know and roll our eyes at in Ireland and the UK and it seems another, the German tradition for order and structure, has survived the degrading effects of glasnost that have liberated them on the pitch.

WAGs will be allowed in the team hotel but probably not overnight; beer and wine are permitted in moderation; social media is permissible within reason while outings are restricted to an hour’s radius of their luxurious lodgings.

Last night’s wanderings were cancelled completely with the arrival to the team hotel of Chancellor Merkel, whose bland image and soaring unpopularity around Europe outstrips anything the most hated of German football teams ever experienced.

“It’s an honour for the team and a very good omen,” said Arsenal defender Per Mertesacker.

“She can be very funny and witty and has a habit of addressing us in five or six short sentences. We hope to pay this back by getting good results in the Euros.”

‘Mutti’? Funny and witty? This really is a new Germany.