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German mutiny Players wanted to dump Ribbeck for Matthäus
Posted: Wednesday June 28, 2000 05:23 PM
BERLIN (AP) -- Lothar Matthäus said Tuesday he was at the center of an attempted player revolt against German coach Erich Ribbeck during training camp leading up to Euro 2000. Matthäus said the influential Bayern Munich and Bayer Leverkusen players wanted to dump Ribbeck and have him coach the squad at the European championship. Germany's Kicker magazine had reported the incident in its latest issue. "Didi Hamann, Jens Jeremies and Markus Babbel and several others said to me during training camp at Mallorca: You should do it, you'll do it better," Matthäus told German TV. The players were upset that Ribbeck, who resigned in humiliation after Germany's debacle at the Euro, changed the tactics they had to practice on a daily basis during the Spanish camp from May 27 to June 2. Matthäus rejected the idea. "How do you expect this to work?' he told the players. "I don't have any experience [as a coach]. Besides that, I wanted to play myself and you can't do that as a coach. You can't 'kill' a coach just before a European Championships." Matthäus, recovering from a thigh injury, was to coach instead of play. He was also supposed to persuade powerful Bayern Munich president Franz Beckenbauer -- with whom he enjoys a close relationship -- to back the revolt. Ribbeck, whose two-year tenure was the shortest of any German national team coach in history, was often accused of lacking knowledge of the game. He was portrayed as a well-dressed eloquent man whose main job was to sell the team's increasingly lousy results to the public. Germany, the only country with three World Cup and as many Euro titles, was ousted in the first round of a major championship for the first time since 1984. The last time they finished dead last in group play was 1938. Midfielder Christian Ziege confirmed the players' discomfort with Ribbeck's waffling tactics at the Euro in a separate interview Tuesday. "Who tells us what to do on the pitch? Normally the coach. But we played three teams with the same defense using three different lineups and three different tactical approaches," said Ziege.
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