For all their excellence, the legacy of the ageing world No 1 team boils down to the next two weeks, starting against Portugal
There is a moment towards the end of the recent BBC documentary Whistle to Whistle in which, after an hour of fixating on the details and minutiae of his job as Belgium coach, Roberto Martínez finally allows himself to take a broader view. “I just feel that this generation deserves silverware,” he says. “They deserve something that will be talked about for the next 50, 60, 70 years. But that doesn’t mean it’s going to happen.”
In those few sentences, Martínez expresses the fundamental paradox of his job, in many ways the fundamental paradox of international football. Since taking over from France in October 2018, Belgium have now been top of the Fifa world rankings for almost three years. They have, by most statistical and qualitative measures, been the world’s best team. The problem, when you get to the sharp end of an international tournament, is that you only get 90 minutes to prove it.
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