The Blues qualified at least against Belgium – Libération

Euro Football 2024fileIn the round of 16 this Monday, the uninspired French occupied the field and the ball ineffectively against the lifeless Red Devils. Until a throw of the dice turned the match around.

The least we can say is that the Belgians and French did not offer a spectacle 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 quarter-finals (1-0) with their offensive impotence, their recurring difficulties in the game, a certain fatigue too, which caught up with Adrien Rabiot or N’Golo Kanté while Antoine Griezmann or Théo Hernandez appeared completely cooked since their arrival in Germany. We will have witnessed highly speculative football, thought out and executed to end the matches on a minimal margin: the two teams shared this idea. And the loser, whoever it was on Tuesday, had no chance of leaving the slightest feeling, the slightest regret behind him. We mean that if the Blues did not do much, the Belgians did not 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…

Belgians, great palaverists

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 got angry every time the ball didn’t reach him, captain Kevin De Bruyne who attacked everyone… A real symposium. Might as well bring chairs and desks. At the pace at which the two teams attacked the match, it shouldn’t have bothered many people. The noise of the Devils told a story, however, betrayed by the long meeting led by Lukaku with the players in circles around him before the match: an exacerbation, this team on the edge of its nerves who know they have to do violence to themselves to snatch something and maintain this state of tension.

The Blues, for their part, played silently. Based on a certain technical superiority and a slightly better acuity in the use of the ball, they first occupied the opposing half of the field in a relaxed manner, with patience, circulating and circulating again a ball of which they did not do much. 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 over, constituted a meager booty while having the merit of livening up the debates. 0-0 to the lemons. The match has well and truly started, but the layman could be mistaken.

Double-barreled shotgun

It started because the Blues held back the Belgian team’s two-shot rifle. The first shot: Lukaku’s physical power, which William Saliba manages 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 the French goalkeeper Mike Maignan with a heavy strike. And then, we saw nothing more at all.

A ball that circulates like the others in front of the Belgian surface, a Griezmann shot, a Koundé shot, a N’Golo Kanté shot that finds Randal Kolo Muani, who came on, in the surface: Jan Vertonghen unfortunately deflects the Parisian’s shot and the Blues took the lead 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 his ilk then threw themselves on every ball like the possessed, Doku was (finally) served first intention and he entered the tricolor defense like a madman would bang his head against the wall. The revolt came from everywhere. After all, you don’t beat the French 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-final is for Friday in Hamburg, and we don’t see how they will find their legs by then. But they are still in the tournament. And we have the feeling, not to mention certainty, that it is useless to ask them for more.