The years go by and are taking their toll on high performance football. Those who used to shine are slowly losing ground to the new generations. Law of life.
The captain of the Belgian national team, Eden Hazard, believes that the best times of the “golden generation” of Belgian football are long gone, but at 30 he believes that this group of players with stars like Kevin de Bruyne (30), Thibaut Courtois (29) or Romelu Lukaku (28) may still give a surprise at the 2022 Qatar World Cup.
“Our best years were 2018 and in the European Championship. But we can still do great things, especially with the players who are coming to the group. It’s a bit like that mixed between young and old and we have to see what happens,” he said. comment on the “ten” of the Red Devils in an interview with public broadcaster RTBF.
The team led by Roberto MartÃnez, eliminated in the quarterfinals of the recent European Championship by Italy, in fact champion, was the team with the eleven most veteran starters of the tournament, with a particularly stale defense: Toby Alderweireld (32), Thomas Vermaelen (35) and Jan Vertonghen (34).
“Replacing the young with the old is the life of a football club and a national team. When the young come in and are good, the older ones come out and that’s it. I probably pushed the players towards the exit when I was young. But if the current old ones are good, you don’t have to take them out. And if a young man is better, the young man will play, “the Real Madrid striker summed up.
Belgium, the leader of their qualifying group for the World Cup in Qatar, will face Tallinn against Estonia on Thursday in the first match of the Red Devils after the “disappointment” of the European Championship, in the words of the captain.
“It’s been a month or two, but it’s still a disappointment. We were eager to get as far as possible, even to win the competition. We didn’t get it, so it’s a failure for us. But the luck we have in football, when we lose one game, we can try to win the next, “Hazard concluded.