Klose to play 100th international in quarterfinal
Germany striker Miroslav Klose is set to play his 100th international game in the World Cup quarterfinal against Argentina. He hopes it won't be his last in a German uniform.
Klose has scored 50 goals in 99 games for Germany and his 12 World Cup goals put him equal with Pele in fourth place overall.
He also is Germany's second-most highest scorer at the World Cup — after Gerd Mueller, who had 14. Mueller holds the overall German record with 68 goals.
That's a lot of success, but Klose wants more.
"He is still very ambitious," Germany coach Joachim Loew said Friday, a day before the Argentina match.
"When someone plays 100 games for a country like Germany, that speaks for his quality, especially since he has scored 50 goals. That's a goal every two games and that's a high level." Loew supported Klose even when the Polish-born striker went through a rough season at Bayern Munich, scoring only three goals in the Bundesliga and spending a lot of time on the bench.
By picking Klose in the World Cup squad and making him the starting forward, Loew surprised some fans in Germany.
Klose has repaid that trust, even though he missed one game by getting sent off in a 1-0 loss to Serbia in the group stage. The striker has said that Loew's faith was very important for him to regain his scoring touch.
"He doesn't get derailed by weak phases, he knows what he has to do in training. He is self-critical and he is modest," Loew said.
In Klose's World Cup debut in 2002, he scored a hat trick in Germany's opening 8-0 rout of Saudi Arabia.
The striker said he thinks Germany's current team is better than the 2002 squad, which reached the final.
"We created fewer chances in 2002 than now. It's one of the great advantages of this team that we easily create many chances," Klose said in an interview posted on the German federation's website.
Loew said he has given his players the freedom to make decisions on the field.
"We still have order and discipline but we don't put players into corsets in which they can't move," he said. "We have a philosophy, the way we want to play. I had a script in my mind and I picked players who can implement what I want."
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