No Home Advantage

His name is Juergen Klinsmann, and these days he is as much conjurer as coach.

The sleight of hand that Klinsmann is attempting to pull off involves furthering his fame in Europe while simultaneously preserving his anonymity in California.

No easy feat, that.

Not when the more rabid elements of the German media are hounding him day and night. Not when opportunistic German politicians smell blood in the water and try to capitalize on his misfortune. Not when Italy has the bad taste to thrash his soccer team, 4-1, and throw all of Deutschland into self-doubt over the upcoming World Cup, which will be played in this country June 9 to July 9.

As Germany’s striker, Klinsmann was a predator. As Germany’s coach, he has become the prey.

And if Germany somehow contrives to lose to the United States in a friendly in Dortmund on Wednesday night, the prey might well be swallowed alive.

First, however, a little background.

Klinsmann played professionally for 20 years, reaching his peak when he won the World Cup in Italy in 1990 and the European Championship in England in 1996. In all, he scored 47 goals in 108 games for Germany.

His club travels took him from VfB Stuttgart in Germany to Inter Milan in Italy to AS Monaco in France to Tottenham Hotspur in England, to Bayern Munich in Germany and finally to Sampdoria in Italy.

He collected silverware all along the way before finally retiring to California and happily falling into a more normal existence.

As the 41-year-old fellow who lives across the road, down the street, around the corner in Huntington Beach, Klinsmann was just another lucky beach-dweller living the good life with his American wife and their two children.

And that’s exactly the way he wanted it.

But fate has a way of interrupting such idylls and that’s what happened to Klinsmann.

Germany had just been humiliated at Euro 2004 in Portugal. Rudi Voeller had been shown the door as coach. Ottmar Hitzfeld and Otto Rehhagel had turned down the job, and the Deutsche Fusbal Bund, or DFB as the German soccer federation is more commonly known, was desperate.

It turned to Klinsmann, a man with no coaching experience whatsoever, but with an enviable resume as a player. “Klinsi” was German folk hero. How could it possibly go wrong?

But “Klinsi” had his own ideas about the job.

He had lived in California since 1998. Consciously or unconsciously, he had adopted American ways. He acknowledged as much in an interview Sunday with a handful of international reporters in Dusseldorf.

“In certain ways I have certainly adopted many things from the United States,” he said. “How to deal with people. How to look at things. How to focus on things. And also to take risks and to say, you know, ‘Let’s go for it.’ That’s certainly more an American trait than a German approach.

“This is the only World Cup we will have in our country for the next 50 or 60 years. Let’s go for it.”

So Klinsmann accepted the job, then immediately ruffled feathers at the hidebound DFB by getting rid of some icons on the coaching staff and bringing in American fitness trainers and even a team psychologist.

Worse yet, he continued to run things from California, commuting back and forth to Germany as he saw fit, despite increasingly forceful suggestions in some soccer circles and the media that he relocate to Germany.

“I communicate the same way when I’m home [in California] as I do when I’m here,” Klinsmann said. “I call people. I e-mail people. I am constantly in touch with people. It doesn’t matter if I call from L.A. or if I call from Milan or if I call from wherever.”

But with the arrival of winter, the tabloid media -- quickly followed by television -- saw an opportunity and jumped. Photographs of Klinsmann jogging on the beach in California suddenly were everywhere.

Trouble was, the photographs were not current.

“They brought up pictures from four, five, six years ago,” Klinsmann said. “I don’t know when I went jogging on the beach the last time, or kicked the ball around with the Galaxy, or whatever.

“I take this job very seriously and I put in all the energy that I have but if people want to destroy the image that I have, I can’t avoid that.”

Relations with the media disintegrated further when tabloid reporters, and not only from Germany, began descending on his Huntington Beach home, probing into his family life and friends.

By late January, the hounding had become so bad that Klinsmann issued a statement through the DFB threatening to take legal action against those who continued to invade his family’s privacy.

He appealed to the media not to use “written or televised information or photos of a private or personal nature.”

“They invent things,” Klinsmann said of the media. He finds it difficult to understand why Germans put themselves through such anguish before every big tournament.

“Typically German,” he calls it.

“We put ourselves down, we try to make everything negative,” he said. “It seems like we do everything possible to be far too skeptical, far too critical, instead of being happy and proud and honored” to be playing host to the World Cup.

The loss to Italy on March 1 was greeted with much wailing and gnashing of teeth in Germany.

“If we play like that at the World Cup, we’ll be obliterated,” said the Bild newspaper, one of Klinsmann’s most vociferous critics.

“Germany shrinks to a soccer dwarf,” said the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.

Even German politicians got in on the act, some wondering out loud why Germany was not doing better and whether the coach should not be replaced.

Others came to Klinsmann’s defense, however.

“I don’t see any point in changing horses in the middle of the race,” Interior Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble said. “Juergen Klinsmann has my trust. There is no doubt about it, he has not taken on a simple task.

“The German football federation, who employed him, knew that Klinsmann is not low maintenance. He follows his own path.”

Last week, German Chancellor Angela Merkel also gave Klinsmann her backing.

Meanwhile, Klinsmann also has shrugged off criticism that has come from another soccer icon, Franz Beckenbauer, the captain of Germany’s 1974 World Cup-winning team, coach of its 1990 World Cup-winning team and now head of the organizing committee for this summer’s World Cup.

“Whatever Beckenbauer says or whatever other players say, they get a big echo in the media because of who they are and what they have achieved,” Klinsmann said, adding that his relationship with Beckenbauer is “totally relaxed.”

“I know how he means things,” he said. “I know how emotional he is, because I’ve known him for 20 years. It takes a cup of coffee, two minutes to calm things down, and I’m fine, not knowing what he will say tomorrow.”

As for Germany’s chances, Klinsmann is optimistic.

“We are not as good as Brazil and Argentina,” he said. “We are not as tactically educated or developed as Italy. We don’t have a Zinedine Zidane or a Thierry Henry [of France] ... but we also have our strengths.

“We have an amazing team spirit, plus we’re playing the tournament at home.”

And as for the critics, they can be ignored.

“If we win our first two games, everyone will try to jump on the train,” he said. “But the train will already have left.”