DPA/Rio de Janeiro

The number of kilometres he has covered have not been registered like his players at the World Cup, but they must be piling up on the beach. “It does me good,” Joachim Loew says of his jogs by the sea at the German training base in north-east Brazil.

The morning runs, sometime before 6 am, were over 33 days in Santo Andre a way of dealing with the stress in the coaching zones of Salvador, Fortaleza, Recife, Porto Alegre, Rio de Janeiro and Belo Horizonte.

“It’s his way of letting off steam,” said captain Philipp Lahm, who has experienced the coach first hand over for 10 years and at three World Cups.

Since becoming head coach in 2006, Loew has led the national team for 111 matches - the 112th in the Maracana stadium will be the most important of them all.

Loew can earn a place in football’s history books on Sunday if Germany win the World Cup to become the first Europeans to do so on the American continent.

If he does it will be a cause for celebration after losing the Euro 2008 final and two World Cup semifinal defeats, as assistant to Juergen Klinsmann in 2006 and four years ago while in charge in South Africa,

Team manager Oliver Bierhoff is himself unsure how Loew will react if he becomes Germany’s fourth World Cup-winning coach.

“Jogi is as he is. It is difficult to say what will happen in the particular moment. I am assuming he won’t be running wildly over the pitch. He will enjoy it and have a feeling of satisfaction.”

Loew has been praised by the senior players he has accompanied over the past decade and there has never been any doubts about the support of his squads.

“The good thing is that not much has changed since he was number 2 behind Juergen Klinsmann,” veteran striker Miroslav Klose said.

“He is always there for you and talks to the players. He has brought in some tactical things and he sees the team as a whole, also those who are not playing. He is always introducing new things in training. He is a fantastic coach.”

Lahm said: “He always has a clear direction - that is important for players. He speaks about things. He is great.”

The title would also be the reward for the team around Loew, including general manager Oliver Bierhoff, assistant Hansi Flick and goalkeeping coach Andreas Koepke with whom the coach has worked since 2006.

“He has a clear idea of what he wants and we take the players along with us,” Bierhoff said.

“I hope that we four can embrace briefly after the incredibly long journey we have taken.”

Loew knows in the end that only results count and does not want to be known as a nearly-man after finishing runners-up at Euro 2008, third at the 2010 World Cup and semifinalists at Euro 2010 in Poland and Ukraine.

“It’s no use saying it’s now Germany’s turn,” the 54-year-old coach said.

However Germany under Loew have shown they have consistently improved in his eight years at the helm and could now reap the benefits of an investment in youth development began more than a decade ago.

“We have stuck at it, invested a lot and made sure we prepared well. And of course we have very good players,” he said.

Loew is the federation’s 10th coach, of whom five have won major tournaments: Sepp Herberger (1954), Helmut Schoen (1974) and Franz Beckenbauer (1990) are World Cup winners, while Schoen also won the 1972 European Championship, as did Jupp Derwall in 1980 and Berti Vogts in 1996.

The first DFB coach, Otto Nerz, was third at the 1934 World Cup, while Erich Ribbeck, Rudi Voeller, Klinsmann and Loew until now have also gone empty-handed.

At the last four World Cups, the German team has reached at least the semi-finals which “speaks for consistency and continuity,” said federation president Wolfgang Niersbach, who was press chief in 1990 in Rome when Germany last won the World Cup.

Niersbach believes it is the federation’s good fortune to have Loew, who has the best results record of all Germany coaches, and made sure long before the World Cup of reaching agreement on a contract extension until Euro 2016 in France.

Niersbach says he will be pleased for Loew if Germany wins on Sunday, if only to silence critics who claimed the coach would not be able to take the final step to a major title.