Les Bleus push aside Belgium after a series of chances – Libération

Euro Football 2024fileThe French team qualified for the quarter-finals on Monday, July 1, by beating the Red Devils by the smallest of scores (1-0). Their quarter-final takes place this Friday in Hamburg.

The least we can say is that the Belgians and French will not have offered a show to wake up a depressed country on Monday, at the Merkur Spiel-Arena in Düsseldorf. But a round of 16 of the European Championship is won and the Blues reached the quarters (1-0) with their offensive impotence, their recurring difficulties in the game, a certain fatigue too, which will have caught up with Adrien Rabiot or N’Golo Kanté while Antoine Griezmann or Théo Hernandez appear completely cooked since their arrival in Germany. We will thus have witnessed highly speculative football, thought out and executed to end the matches on a minimum margin: the two teams shared this idea. And the loser, whoever he was on Tuesday, had no chance of leaving the slightest feeling, the slightest regret behind him. We want to say that if the Blues didn’t do much, the Belgians didn’t steal their premature return home either.

The French coach, Didier Deschamps, had further modified his tactical batteries by coming out with a system called 4-3-3 (four defenders, three midfielders, three attackers, two of whom are spread out on the wings) with Antoine Griezmann giving up his playmaker position to move to the right side, something he had not done in the national team for a while. Advantage of the system: getting Ousmane Dembélé out of the team, who has been indigent since the start of the competition. And reshuffling the deck. Afterwards, if there are no aces…

We were first struck by the incredible number of meetings undertaken by the Belgian players. Jan Verthongen with Amadou Onana, the same Onana with Romelu Lukaku, Jérémy Doku who protested every time the ball didn’t reach him, captain Kevin De Bruyne who attacked everyone… A real symposium . Might as well bring back chairs and desks. At the rate the two teams attacked the match, it wouldn’t have bothered many people. The uproar of the Devils, however, told a story, betrayed by the long meeting led by Lukaku with the players in circles around him before the match: an exacerbation, this team on the verge of nerves which knows it must use violence to snatch something and hold this state of tension.

The Blues played in silence. Based on a certain technical superiority and a slightly superior acuity in the use of the ball, they will first have occupied the opposing half of the field like a relaxed father, with patience, circulating and circulating again a ball of which they will not have does a lot. A header from Marcus Thuram (34th) on a cross from Jules Koundé and a strike from Aurélien Tchouaméni after a fierce overflow from Kylian Mbappé (45th +1), both times above, will have constituted a meager loot while having the deserves to liven up the debates. 0-0 to lemons. The meeting has indeed begun, but the philistine could have made a mistake.

It started because the Blues held back the Belgian team’s two-shot rifle. The first blow: Lukaku’s physical power, which William Saliba holds back without apparent effort. And Doku’s dribbling quality, the best in this exercise during this Euro so far (the statistics are proof), which Doku sees two or three French defenders emerge as soon as he touches a ball. With the respective influence of Griezmann (right) and Mbappé (left) tending towards zero, the second half was quite long, although the Belgians continued to animate it with words, with increasing goodwill towards each other, it seemed to us. Between that and the relative silence of the French supporters massed in the stadium, we ended up seeing it as a bad sign for the Blues, especially since De Bruyne went to get the gloves of French goalkeeper Mike Maignan with a heavy strike. And then, we saw nothing more at all.

A ball which circulates like the others in front of the Belgian area, a Griezmann shot, a Koundé shot, a N’Golo Kanté shot which finds Randal Kolo Muani, coming into play, in the area: Jan Vertonghen unfortunately deflects the Parisian’s shot and the Blues took control like that (1-0, 85th), on a roll of the dice. And it was there, for barely ten minutes, that we glimpsed what the match could have been. De Bruyne and others then threw themselves at all the balls like maniacs, Doku was (finally) served as first intention and he entered the French defense like a madman banging his head against the walls. The revolt came from everywhere. Afterwards, you don’t beat the France team by playing ten minutes.

After six days without a match, the Blues will resume their infernal rhythm of a match every four days: their quarter is for Friday in Hamburg, and we don’t see how they will find their legs between now and then. But they are still in the tournament. And we have the feeling, not to speak of certainty, that it is useless to ask them more.