On an emotional day Kevin de Bruyne’s introduction helped turn the tide but the Belgian defence never looked comfortablePerhaps this wasn’t the game for making proper judgments. Belgium were in the desperately awkward position of being the other team in the face of a great outpouring of Danish emotion, and for half the game they struggled in that role. But the introduction of Kevin De Bruyne, back after surgery on the facial injury he sustained in the Champions League final, changed everything.But beyond talk of the difficult emotion of the occasion or of De Bruyne’s brilliance, there are other issues for Belgium. Going forward after half-time, they looked like the side that had scored 40 goals in qualifying. Romelu Lukaku,...
The attacking talent Gareth Southgate is keen to use keeps getting bogged down by stodgy and defensive selectionsShortly before half-time at the King Power at Den Dreef Stadium, Harry Kane could be seen scooting back into his own half to take the ball. Ten seconds later he was kicked heavily on an ankle driving through the centre circle. Ten seconds after that Kane was in an inverted left-winger role, cutting in to fire a cross-shot against the lunge of Jason Denayer.Throughout this sequence, a triptych of deep-midfield-Kane, playmaker-Kane and winger-Kane, it was hard not to long for another Kane: the ghost Kane, saving his spring, doing No 9-type things; and not forced to become Kane cubed, both pointlessly ever-present and...
Forget the Nations League: this is a rare opportunity for the England manager to perfect his tactics against superior sidesThere is a website called The Size of Belgium that for more than a decade has been dutifully tracking the Anglophone world’s curiously enduring habit of using the country’s area as a rhetorical unit of measurement. For example, “an area the size of Belgium” is lost globally to deforestation each year, according to the United Nations. The search area for missing flight MH370 was described in several media outlets as “the size of Belgium”. The Lonely Planet guidebook, meanwhile, refers to Yorkshire as “half the size of Belgium”.How did Belgium ascend to this exalted status? Not, you have to assume, through...
Giggs’s credentials under the microscope, Berahino’s Burundi opportunity and another international debut for RiceSpeaking to the Elis James Feast Of Football podcast last week, Ryan Giggs admitted Slovakia are his Wales side’s main rivals to qualify alongside Croatia from a group in which Hungary and and Azerbaijan are likely to do little more than make up the numbers. Despite having Gareth Bale and Aaron Ramsey on board, along with an influx of several exciting young prospects, their best performance under Giggs remains a 4-1 demolition of a dire Republic of Ireland side last September that perhaps gave fans unrealistic expectations of similar things to follow. They haven’t and Nations League defeats at home and away against Denmark, along with friendly...
Managers of Belgium and England struggled in the Premier League’s long slog but are perfectly suited to the intensity and short time span of a World CupRoberto Martínez still lives on the outskirts of Wigan, his dormitory village on the edge of the Lancashire plain proving as convenient a base for managing Belgium as it was for his previous jobs at Wigan Athletic and Everton.It is already becoming easy to forget that the man who sent Brazil home early from Russia was practically run out of town while in his last Premier League post; certainly by the end of the 2015-16 season there were not too many Everton supporters sorry to see him go. It is quite a neat trick...