I’d expect the German U18 team to get stomped this year unfortunately.
There is a few players to watch but the group as a whole have been dissapointing internationally as of late. We even lost a game against Japan recently .
To be fair, that appears to be a pretty good team Japan has there. They only lost 0-3 to Switzerland and 2-4 to Slovakia in the same tournament keeping both of those games fairly close.
And for some reason Germany was able to beat Slovakia 4-3 in a shootout to end that tournament.
But yes, this group will almost certainly lose every game, unless there are some crazy goalie heroics. Although I am not expecting all games to be blowouts, as long as everybody is healthy.
We have some forwards that are not so bad on the defensive end, and while there are no high end players anywhere on the roster, the defense looks solid in terms of depth at a decent level. Mayer, Tropmann, Panocha and Niehus should be a decent top4, add to that Bosecker and maybe one of the 06s like Merkl or Schams or whoever from the 05s and it is looking like one of the better groups we've had in recent years.
But overall I still have low expectations, because almost none of the players have developed as well as I had hoped before the season started.
