Group E: Belgium v Ireland, Saturday, 5 pm (UAE time)
The most one-sided contest in the first week or so of the European Championship may well have been the victory of Belgium B over Belgium A. The game, a training exercise, took place ahead of their opening match against Italy. The first-teamers lost quite heavily and were outplayed.
If events in the Italy game had then turned out differently, that might have been read as an encouraging sign for coach Marc Wilmots.
Belgium’s strength in depth is something the rest of Europe has for a long time looked upon in some awe. That the men who line the substitutes’ bench can more than hold their won against the designated starters could only burnish the reputation of Belgium’s so-called golden generation, proof that this a squad made not of 11-carat precious medal but a full 23-carats worth of high-class.
But Belgium’s best stumbled against the Italians, and now require, on Saturday afternoon in Bordeaux, three points to realign their Euro 2016 campaign, justify their position in the contemporary Fifa rankings as Europe’s leading national team. And to ease the growing symptoms of tension within the camp.
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There have been reports of a row between goalkeeper Thibaut Courtois and Wilmots in the immediate aftermath of the 2-0 loss to the Italians, then of Wilmots delivering a stern talking-to to Yannick Carrasco, the Atletico Madrid striker. Because the result was a let-down, Radja Naingollan’s apparent anger at being substituted against Italy is taken as a sign of schism.
The coach, meanwhile, has been criticised in the Belgian media for having publicly put some of the blame for Belgium’s goalless yield from their first 90 minutes of competition on Romelu Lukaku, who started at centre-forward. Lukaku had a poor night. That is not in dispute. The wisdom of Wilmots in saying so in his news conference is.
Courtois’s observation that, against Italy, “tactically we fell short of what we needed,” barely did more than state the obvious. But when the last line of defence, a goalkeeper who is a former Premier League and Spanish league champion, points that out of a team full of men who have mostly won major club prizes in the best leagues is under par collectively, the buck, by implication, passes to the coach.
As the Belgian newspaper La Deniere Heure put it plainly: "It's not the Red Devils who are playing for their lives against Ireland, it's the coach, and under pressure three times over, with his tactical decisions, his results, and maybe his communication skills."
Patience with how long it will take this group of Belgian players, who share such a concentration of club medals and elite club contracts, to wow international football is wearing thin after a World Cup in which they left at the quarter-final stage. “The Wilmots charm has run out,” the newspaper said.
When Wilmots took over as national coach, he came with a bank of goodwill, based on his apparent clear-sightedness and also the authority of his playing career. As an all-action, skilled, industrious attacking midfielder, he was the stand-out footballer in an age not of a golden seam of Belgian talent but a threadbare collection of colleagues.
At times in the 2002 World Cup, Wilmots seemed to carry the Red Devils single-handedly on the field. For more than a decade after that, Belgium missed out entirely on major international summers. When he joined as assistant coach in 2009, they were ranked 68th in the world by Fifa.
Wilmots has contemplated changes to his XI to take on the Irish, who drew their first match against Sweden. Lukaku may be vulnerable, with Liverpool’s Divock Origi in reserve. Captain Eden Hazard and Kevin De Bruyne, once colleagues at Chelsea, are under pressure to show they can operate in a productive tandem.
If not, one Red Devil will find himself demonised above all: the coach, Wilmots.
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