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Can Belgium’s world-beaters land a major trophy? It may be now or never | Jonathan Liew

For all their excellence, the legacy of the ageing world No 1 team boils down to the next two weeks, starting against PortugalThere 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...

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Martínez and Southgate: too naive for Premier League but men of the world | Paul Wilson

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...

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