Belgium's World Cup exit came laden with a dash of cruelty on Thursday in Qatar.
Yet it still could have advanced, as if to elude the cloud and seek the freedom outgoing manager Roberto Martínez had craved for it, had it scored even once in this battle of rosters with key players often deemed on the downslopes of their primes.For a good while Thursday night, both teams looked shy of spry. Then as if to prove how old bones can regenerate, the two sides produced flurry after flurry each way as if to wake up the 43,894 witnesses.
Croatians including Mateo Kovacic, Marcelo Brozovic and the great Luka Modric, nowadays 37, presented enough pressure that Belgian goalkeeper Thibaut Courtois had to undergo some gymnastics to keep his team from even more inconvenience than it had.The bigger threats happened in the other end. Kevin De Bruyne, the Belgium and Manchester City midfielder so admired in global soccer, yet so ineffectual by his own standard here, found his way to some effective creation. Then two chances glared most.
First, in the 60th minute, De Bruyne fed a sweet pass to Yannick Carrasco, who charged up the left and forced Josip Juranovic to make a fine block, whereupon the ball popped over to Lukaku, whose blast smacked against the right post. One minute later, Lukaku headed over the goal from De Bruyne’s running cross, but that probably wouldn’t have counted given De Bruyne sent that ball from behind the line. Two other mild chances would visit Lukaku from there, but it was the one in the 90th minute that will roil for good.
For that oh-my-god chance, substitute Jeremy Doku made some splendid shedding of Croatian defenders enough to get the ball over to Thorgan Hazard, also a sub , on the right. Hazard’s cross was so fine that it might have made him the bigger Hazard on the evening, the longtime star Eden Hazard having not started and not entered until the 87th minute after some recent struggles.
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