Germany's coach Joachim Loew takes part in a training session at the Super stadium in Atteridgeville near Pretoria on July 5, 2010. Germany faces Spain on July 7 for their 2010 World Cup semi-final match.JOHN MACDOUGALL/AFP / Getty Images
Even after clinically demolishing two of the world's top-ranked teams by a combined 8-1 score last week, Germany has failed to impress the book makers. The Germans are the underdogs in their World Cup semi-final against Spain this week - and they are quietly content with that status.
It's exactly where German head coach Joachim Loew wants his team to be: underappreciated, underrated, and ready to upset the bookies again. The ultra-humble posture, however, won't fool everyone. This time, there will be much less surprise from soccer fans if Germany wins and advances to the final.
In the meantime, Germany is anxious to avoid the pressure that goes along with being the World Cup front-runner.
"Spain remains the natural World Cup favourites," Loew insisted at a press conference on Monday, describing the Spaniards as far superior to Argentina and its superstar Lionel Messi.
"They not only have one Messi, they have several Messis," he said. "They have a whole range of players that can win a game, so we will have to be very watchful against them. They are a team that makes very few mistakes. We have to force them into making mistakes."
By any objective measure, the Germans should be the favourites in Wednesday's semi-final. They cruised through their first five matches with four victories, allowing their opponents a grand total of just two goals. They're also the highest-scoring team in the tournament, with 13 goals. To reach the semi-finals, they destroyed England 4-1 and then crushed Argentina 4-0.
Spain, by contrast, looked unimpressive in its opening-round matches and struggled to beat Paraguay 1-0 in the quarter-finals. But the odds makers remember that Spain toppled Germany in the 2008 European championship. They remember that Spain had a perfect winning record in all of its qualifying matches for the 2010 World Cup. And they remember that Spain has sailed along at the top of the world rankings for most of the past two years. After Brazil's loss to the Netherlands in the quarter-finals, Spain is now the highest-rated team remaining in this tournament.
Germany, however, is a far better team than most pundits had expected. Forget all the archetypal images. This is not the coldly efficient Teutonic team that stereotypes might suggest. The Germans form one of the youngest, fastest, most creative, most multicultural and most exciting teams in the world.
The team boasts an average age of just 25 - making it the youngest German team since 1934 - and youth gives it a speed and energy most teams cannot match. This is also a heavily diverse and multiracial team, featuring 11 players who could qualify for other national teams around the world.
Stars such as Miroslav Klose and Lukas Podolski (both born in Poland), Jerome Boateng (whose father is Ghanaian) and Mesut Oezil (of Turkish descent) have been crucial to Germany's rise at this World Cup.
"This team shows the new face of Germany," said Franz Beckenbauer, the legendary captain of West Germany's winning team at the 1974 World Cup and coach of its last World Cup championship team in 1990.
"You have to go back 20 years to see as strong a German side as this. Nobody in Germany expected to see them play so well."
Klose, who scored twice in the victory over Argentina, now has 14 goals over the last three World Cups, putting him just one goal behind the Brazilian sniper Ronaldo for the all-time career scoring record in the tournament.
Another top scorer is 20-year-old Thomas Mueller, who was playing in Germany's third division as recently as last year. He has four goals in this World Cup, but will miss the semi-final because of a suspension after he picked up a second yellow card against Argentina.
Germany's captain, Philipp Lahm, is just 26. He was named skipper on the eve of the World Cup, after an injury suffered by veteran captain Michael Ballack three weeks before the tournament's opening match. Yet he is already being touted as a possible winner of the Golden Ball trophy as the top player, with an impressive 80-per-cent accuracy rate in his passes so far.
In an interview with a German newspaper this week, Loew revealed one of his motivational techniques to speed up his team's movement on the field - although it required a sardonic jab at Canada's underperforming soccer team.
"I said to the team: 'If you don't move around the pitch, you're not even going to beat teams like Canada!' " the German coach told the newspaper. "That was our golden rule from Day 1."