ROMSO Cyprus Knowledge Base

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This article is about the Belgian national football team at the 2018 World Cup. Belgium took part in the final for the thirteenth time.

Qualification
The team qualified for the World Cup in Russia via the qualification matches of the European Football Association UEFA.

Games

Belgium faced Greece, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Estonia, Cyprus and Gibraltar in Group H, with Gibraltar only being assigned to the group after its inclusion in FIFA. In the ten resulting encounters, the Belgian team carried nine victories and played once draw. The Belgians only scored the match in the 89th minute. Belgium qualified early on the third last match day as the first European team sporting for the World Cup finals. The Belgians scored 43 goals and thus together with defending champion Germany the most goals, but conceded two more goals.

A total of 26 players were used, of which 17 were already in the EM squad. Fourteen players were used in at least five games, but only two players – goalkeeper Thibaut Courtois and Jan Vertonghen, who replaced Jan Ceulemans as Belgium’s record national player in the last qualifying match – in all ten games. Axel Witsel missed the maximum number of ten games due to a red card in the fourth last game and came up with only eight bets.

The best scorer with eleven goals was Romelu Lukaku, who was thus the third best scorer of the European qualification. Captain Eden Hazard scored six goals and Dries Mertens and Thomas Meunier scored five goals each. In total, 12 Belgian players met. In addition, the Belgians benefited from five own goals of opposing players. His first international goal was scored by Thorgan Hazard in the last qualifying match at 4-0 against Cyprus. Before and after him, his brother Eden scored 1:0 and 3:0. With Jordan and Romelu Lukaku came on the 7th. In October 2016, two other brothers joined forces, but only Romelu from goal scorer was active and Jordan only had this one.

Final table of the qualification round

Note: The second-placed Greek team failed in the playoff games of the group runners to Croatia.

Preparation

Games

Quarters
Team quarters were the “Country Club” in Moscow, where the team could use the sports complex Guchkovo in Dedovsk for training.

Cadre
The provisional squad for the World Cup was named on May 21. The 28-member squad had to go until the 4. June will be reduced to 23 players. Matz Sels (goal), Christian Benteke, Laurent Ciman, Christian Kabasele and Jordan Lukaku were cancelled.

Final round

Group draw

For the drawing of qualification groups on 1 January In December, the Belgians were assigned pot 1 and therefore could not join a group with defending champion Germany, record world champion Brasili