So what were the difficult barriers

The hardest to my mind was RS Gold myself in every sense so that I could be at the top for a period of several years, week in week out, playing well every three days. Playing to a high standard is not so hard. The big challenge is overcoming every hurdle you face in trying to stay at that level. A little bit of cold weather is nothing compared to that.

 

At Bayern there’s the added pressure of having won the lot in 2012/13 and becoming one of the most highly regarded teams in world football. Isn’t it the case now that a lot of people just expect you to win?

Yes, that’s right. Like I said, the hardest thing in sport is to maintain a high standard over a period of time, which is exactly the reason why I don’t understand it when people think it’s easy for us to win trophies, as if we don’t have any opposition in winning them. It creates a negative energy and we have to be on our guard to make sure it doesn’t affect us. Football is a lot harder than some people think. It doesn’t matter how many talented players we have. We have to work hard all week just to be able to entertain the idea of winning a title.

 

On a personal note, you’ve kept your standards high and have just been voted by the players’ union as the best defender in the Bundesliga for the third season running. Coming from your fellow professionals, that’s a pretty special award isn’t it? 

It is very special. I have a lot of respect for sports reporters, but it’s great to get the recognition of the people who are out there with you day after day, watching videos of our team and facing us on the pitch. To have their approval tells me that I’m doing a good job and makes me very proud. But like I said, the hard thing now is to maintain that level.

 

I learned that if you don’t control yourself psychologically, there comes a time when words like ‘love’, ‘determination’ and ‘emotion’ are not enough.Dante on what he learnt at Brazil 2014

Inevitably, we have to talk about the FIFA World Cup semi-final against Germany. Have you watched the game again? What’s your view of it now that a few months have gone by?

I’ve seen it, and I don’t have a problem talking about it either. I’m not scared of criticism or hearing negative things. I’m never going to forget it and it still hurts. It hurts a lot when I think about that day, and the only way we can make that pain go away is by winning more titles in the future. I’m calm about it, though.

 

My view on it is that we didn’t prepare for the World Cup in the right way psychologically. We should have looked on ourselves as favourites and felt that need to win, all while having respect for the game and all the unpredictable things it can throw up. When we let the second and third goals in we didn’t want to see what was happening. We didn’t think. We didn’t think that we needed to face up to the situation and be more intelligent. Instead we just thought: “This isn’t possible. It can’t be happening. We have to win the Cup. Let’s attack.” After that we went into a state of shock, and the 7-1 scoreline was the result. The thing is, we all know that when you have a bad spell in a match, the normal thing to do is to tighten things up and slow the game down a little. And a lot of the time you get a goal back from a free-kick or a corner. How many times have we seen that with our clubs? 

 

The scoreline didn’t reflect the difference in quality between the two teams, but it did reflect our psychological state heading into the World Cup. We weren’t prepared for things going wrong, and that was down to the pressure. We went ahead in every game we played from the Confederations Cup onwards, almost always early on. The only exception was the Opening Match of the World Cup against Croatia, which was a really tough game. Our preparations were focused on us becoming the champions but not on how to handle things if they went wrong. There are times when having a ‘We have to win’ mentality can work in your favour, but in a psychological sense you need to have more vision that that.

 

It’s been said that no team has ever played under as much pressure as Brazil did in the World Cup. Do you agree with that?

That might be true. The Brazilian national team is a unique case and there’s no other tournament like the World Cup, so to play in one in Brazil is not something that everyone can handle. Every minute of it was an intense experience for me, regardless of the final outcome. It was a great experience, in both a positive and a negative sense. I learned a lot.