By Jurgen Klinsmann World Cup-winning striker, former Germany coach and BBC pundit Germany have impressed everyone with their attacking displays en route to the semi-finals of this World Cup. But it is only six years ago that, like England this summer, they were returning home early from a major tournament and wondering what the future held. Germany had to rebuild after the disaster of the 2004 European Championship in Portugal. We did not win a game and failed to get out of our group. I got the chance to decide on the direction we took when I agreed to take over as Germany coach that summer, with current manager Joachim Loew as my assistant. 'Jogi' and I began the whole regeneration process by trying to give our national team an identity. We eventually decided to go down an attack-minded route, passing the ball on the ground from the back to the front line as quickly as possible using dynamic football. From that, we created a style of play that this Germany team in South Africa now really lives and breathes. Since 2004, we have reached two World Cup semi-finals and the final of Euro 2008. Can England recover from their poor showing in South Africa as quickly as Germany did six years ago? Yes, but they cannot just copy the German style and expect that to succeed for them. Every nation has its own culture and specific environment as well as its own footballing identity. England have to develop their own vision and decide how they should play. As I found, making that vision work is not an easy process. It will take time and England's results might not be positive while it takes effect. England will also need the help of the Premier League. Every club coach will have their own philosophy but I tried to work with those in the Bundesliga to build something together. There are a lot of foreign players and managers in England but that should not make a difference. You simply have to explain to them what the style of play is that you want to develop and be prepared to persevere. When Jogi and I took over the German side, we made our plans very public and made it clear that we were trying to rebuild from the bottom up. The German Football Association (DFB) helped us by putting a lot of pressure on all the first and second division teams in the Bundesliga to build academy programmes and ensure talented young players were coming through but we still had to decide on our playing style. To do that, we quizzed everyone we could. We held workshops with German coaches and players, asking them to write down on flip charts three things: how they wanted to play, how they wanted to be seen to be playing by the rest of the world and how the German public wanted to see us playing. If we could define all of that, we thought we could lay out how we wanted to work and then, from there, sort out the training and paperwork behind the scenes. What we ended up with amounted to 10 or 12 bullet points laying out our proposals. We then announced that it was our intention to play a fast-paced game, an attacking game and a proactive game.