In the obligation to win against the Croats to qualify, the Red Devils could not do better than a draw (0-0). A result synonymous with elimination for the third of the 2018 World Cup. A road trip to the end of the cycle.
by Walid Kachour
What was Thierry Henry, he was thinking, looking for the final whistle, when he comforted Romelu Lukaku, in tears? The ex-drummer of the French team-today Deputy coach of Belgium-perhaps reviewed the images of his foal unable to find the flaw for the sixty-sixth time with the jersey of the Red Devils. Held in check by Croatia (0-0), Thursday 1 er December, at the Ahmad-Ben-Ali stadium in Al-Rayyan, in Qatar, the Belgians lost what looked like ” final “group C and will not see the knockout stages.
“It’s over, it’s a shame, we wanted to go much further, for us, for the Belgian people, for everyone. We are all disappointed that it is already finished”, deplored the attacker Jérémy Doku, quoted by AFP.
Third of their hen at the start, the Red Devils had no choice: they must have imposed themselves to obtain one of the two tickets for the knockout stages. Criticized for his “conservatism” by local media, Roberto Martinez nevertheless made strong choices, leaving Eden Hazard and Romelu Lukaku on the bench for the benefit of the veteran Dries Mertens and the rising star Leandro Trossard.
After the defeat, Sunday, November 27, against Morocco (0-2), the tension was mounted, by interposed media, between the locker rooms of the locker room, Jan Vertonghen and Kevin de Bruyne in mind. Not the best way to prepare a decisive match against the 2018 edition finalist.
After a laborious first quarter of an hour, the Belgians took control of the game and put, in their races, an intensity that they were missing before Canada and Morocco. Kevin de Bruyne, who had declared in the Guardian, on November 26, that his team “had no chance of winning the World Cup”, found his keen sense of the pass to offer two good balls finally badly negotiated by Mertens and Yannick Carrasco.
The coach announces his resignation
Always biting on the return from the locker room, the Belgians did not manage to tip things on their own. Disappointing, Trossard has given way to Lukaku, in delicacy with his thigh and who had only played a quarter of an hour in two games at the World.
The top scorer in the history of the selection weighed as soon as he entered by his presence in the surface. But its purpose of the 90 e minute may remain as the biggest failure of this first part of competition. In lack of rhythm and lucidity, he chooses the chest to try to propel the ball into the empty cage. A totally missed gesture, which ends in the arms of the very happy Dominik Livakovic, the Croatian goalkeeper. It was the end of Belgian hopes.
Roberto Martinez’s last tactical poker stroke was not paying. At the end of the match, the Spanish technician announced his resignation, after six years of presence on the Belgian bench. “I say goodbye to the national team, and it’s full of emotion, as you can imagine,” he said at a press conference. He had taken in hand the Red Devils in 2016, driving them in particular in the semi-finals of the 2018 World Cup.
🇧🇪 Roberto Martínez confirmed that Ha Sido Su último Partido Como Seleccionador de Bélgica. https://t.co/3hmgweaf8s
Belgium will not see the final table of the World Cup. It is a bitter failure for the country which appears in second place in the ranking of the International Football Federation (FIFA). It is perhaps also the end of a story for the “Eden Hazard generation”, a former symbol of a spectacular Belgium, capable of beat any team on the football planet.
After emotion and crying, the unfortunate Lukaku expressed his anger with a raging fist, brittle the glass wall of the sidelines. Nothing guarantees us that the Ahmad-Ben-Ali stadium will keep the relic. This was the case with the door of the Zentrastadion of Leipzig (Germany), marked by the traces of crampons of a angry Zinedine Zidane, after a draw of the Blues against South Korea during the 2006 World Cup.