Mate, I am Polish and I have had to witness goalless Lewandowski in the past three World Cups especially when he had a very easy group in Russia in 2018. So I've seen a bottler for the past ten years or so sadly myself, barring the 2016 Euros which was actually a really good tourney for us. Not even Belgium has been able to see a run like that.
GWT: World Cup - Group F (Morocco and Croatia Advance)
- Thread starter bluesfan94
- Start date
Belgium has got to be considered the #1 choke and disappointment of the tournament.
Ranked 2nd in the world rankings, with so many hyped-up players on their roster.
Ranked 2nd in the world rankings, with so many hyped-up players on their roster.
Burner Account
Registered User
- Feb 14, 2008
- 37,418
- 1,744
JimmyApples
Registered User
- Sep 24, 2021
- 3,457
- 3,494
cgf
FireBednarsSuccessor
That's nostalgia. Those were goods players. Very good.
Ceulemns never want outside of Belgium, Pfaff was at Bayern, OK, and Scifo was truly very good, but never what you would consider on of the very best in the world.
2016-18 Belgium had Curtouis (arguably word's best GK, or at the very worst, one of the best), KDB (over the last 10 years I would take only Modric over him in midfield), a peak Hazard (surely a top-10 player in the world, maybe even more than that), a still competent Alderweireld and Verthongen as CBs, Kompany before that, etc.
They had some good results from 1980 to 1988. But nowhere near the consistency of this Belgian generation.
FIFA rankings are flawed (even ridiculous), but Belgium was #1 for 5 years. They were really good.
Also, Martinez isn't wrong. Their Golden Generation set the stage for years to come. There should be no black hole or a major fall after KDB, Curtois and the other retire - they have great talent already lined up to replace them.
karhukissa
Registered User
- Apr 2, 2019
- 1,823
- 2,449
Germany is the #1 choke imo, Morocco is better than Japan and if you really dive into Belgium, it's mostly a shadow of that golden genration aside from KDB. Lot of young talent (in the bench) and not in starting eleven.
Also hopefully Morocco doesn't win this tournament, Belgium will most likely look like Crimea after that.
Savi
Registered User
So, things have settled down a bit, but the disappointment is still there even though it was kinda expected that this tournament would be way tougher than the previous World Cup. Not a lot of confidence within the general public about the outcome of this WC and the reason(s) why have been here to see for everyone during these group stage games.
Now, about the whole "golden generation" thing, I really kinda hate that term and I don't really use it because as someone said, this is not the first time in history Belgium has such a strong team. So this isn't like Puskas' Hungary or the Chile team from the past decade, in my opinion. Also, when you use that term, you at the same time label them a failure when they don't win a tournament. And while many of us are disappointed, I still think it's a bit unfair to say this generation has failed. As if having a top squad automatically guarantees you a tourney win. It's still incredibly, unbelievably hard to win something. Especially when you're a smaller country. Just ask the Netherlands. Also, both in 2018 and in 2020 we were eliminated by the eventual winners.
It's hard to compare generations, but the 80's team isn't really that far behind our current generation. Maybe not in true star power, but apart from the players mentioned there were several others like Georges Grun in defence (won a Europacup with Parma), or striker Erwin Vandenbergh who actually won a European Golden Boot scoring 39 goals in a season once, and was nominated for the Ballon d'Or several times. Most of the top players of course weren't playing abroad (because of the football landscape back then) but at Anderlecht or Club Brugge, but those teams were playing in European Finals.
Not because he didn't want to. Milan really pushed to get him, but Club Brugge simply refused every offer. He could have been Milan's Gullit, before Gullit was there.
The game yesterday was pretty decent I think, it's easy to blame Lukaku but it would be unfair to say it's his fault we are out because of how poor we were in the first two games. I think a match fit Lukaku finishes at least one of those chances but he clearly wasn't 100% . What I will say is how different and how much better we look with Lukaku up front instead of Batshuayi (or anyone else for that matter), this might have been the biggest problem in the first games where we barely created anything. Which brings me neatly to Martinez. During his entire tenure here, it's always been clear how poor of a tactician he is. I know I've said that many times. For 6 years he always used the same 3-4-3 tactic, whether it worked or not. But more often than not we just won games before of our talent, and never because of a tactical advantage. That works in about 80 to 90% of the games you play.
But almost every time we played an opponent who we couldn't dominate on a talent level, we struggled. I've seen Brazil and Portugal outplay us, I've seen France and Italy completely shut us down, I've seen a mediocre Netherlands squad just run past us. Against the true top teams, our 3-4-3 formation almost always looked hopeless, with huge gaps between lines, which led to an inability to create chances, which in turn led to games lost because I've never seen Martinez make a tactical change during a match, which actually turned it around in a good way for us.
His selection policy has been a much talked about theme for the past few years, too. I think, in his head, Martinez still lives in 2018. He even talks like that sometimes in interviews. "It worked against Brazil, so it should still work today". The fact that it's 2022 and you still put Vertonghen, Witsel and Mertens in your starting lineup won't convince anyone you're the still the man for the job. Martinez' lawyer now actually has come out and said he knew he was going to quit even before the WC started. It's like having an employee who already gave his notice and doesn't care anymore if he f***s it up in his final weeks. Of course Martinez won't play the young guys and will give the old boys one final shot. Always defending them, too. Meanwhile you have Doku only playing 15 minutes and still doing better than Hazard in 2 games. Or you don't start Onana until game 2, then you sub him after 60 minutes and before the Croatia game you tell everyone how not having Onana is a big loss
Really when you look back at everything, only the 2016-18 period went crescendo under Martinez, apart from coaching the team he is also the Technical director of the Belgian FA (which, in the end, was a job that suits him way better than also being the manager) and if we're truly honest he really did a great job because he modernized the structure of Belgian football. He's a professional, he's a great human being, he's an excellent people manager ... he just is not a very good manager, and we always be left wondering how this generation of players would have done with a world class manager. Maybe this is the time, now that we have the rep, to finally convince someone like that to take the job. The overall talent will decline a bit of course but the future still looks bright I think because we got plenty of good young prospects on the way. And Courtois, De Bruyne and Lukaku will still be the backbone of this team for the next 2 or 3 tournaments, so we won't have to start from scratch.
That's it for now, I think.
Spring in Fialta
A malign star kept him
Of course a Sens fan would know all about not winning games and be confused at watching a team accomplish something.
