Germany back 'home' to prepare for Poland

The German national team's bus pulled through the gates of the Ermitage, on the outskirts of Evian at just before 4 a.m. on Monday, to the applause of the waiting hotel staff. A few hours after having beaten Ukraine 2-0 to get their Euro 2016 campaign off to a winning start, the players quickly filed off to their rooms for some well-deserved rest.

Not much is expected to be seen of coach Joachim Löw's team in Monday, with the main focus for the players who saw action in Lille to be in recovery. They can be expected to do some light running or perhaps go for a bike ride, in addition to some regeneration training.

The players who didn't make it onto the pitch on Sunday night were to be involved in a standard training session.

No press conference or any other media opportunity was scheduled for Monday, as Löw and his coaching staff were set to begin analyzing what little went wrong on Sunday, likely with a particular focus on the defense.

Acrobatic clearance

In both Germany and La Mannschaft's temporary home, France, much of the shares on Social Media on Sunday evening and into the day after have pointed to a desperate defensive move as one of the plays of the game.

The French sports newspaper L'Equipe was among the outlets to tweet about Jerome Boateng's acrobatic move to save Manuel Neuer's bacon on the line.

What was generally lost on the French media was the recent controversy stemming from a high-level member of the right-wing German political party AfD (Alternative for Germany). Shortly before the tournament started, the party's deputy leader, Alexander Gauland was quoted in national daily as saying that while the dark-skinned Jerome Boateng was a fine player, nobody in Germany would wanted to have him as their neighbor.

The party and Gauland may have since called his precise words into question, but they stuck, and many in Germany took to Twitter to say they would be more than happy to be Boateng's neighbor.

Mighty neighborly

His heroic save off the line against Ukraine on Sunday evening lit up the Twitterverse again, with the "Sportschau" of public broadcaster ARD leading the way in proclaiming that Neuer was lucky to have Boateng as his neighbor on the pitch.

Even coach Löw got into the act. Asked what he'd made of Boateng's clearance off the line, Löw replied that: "It is always good to have Jerome as a neighbor in the defense."

The other Germany players being talked about in the French press the morning after their first Euro 2016 match were Shkodran Mustafi for his opening goal, Neuer, credited with making a number of key saves to keep Ukraine off the board, and of course the captain, Bastian Schweinsteiger, for his goal in time-added-on, just seconds after being subbed on.

In the German camp in France's Haute-Savoie department, though, after the players have got some rest, the entire focus of Joachim Löw and his staff will shift to what could be an even tougher challenge, when they face Poland in their next Group C game, in Paris on Thursday.