Could Belgium manage the unthinkable and pull off a World Cup group-stage exit? | OneFootball

One of our most confident predictions ahead of this tournament was that no big team would manage to crash out at the group stage.

It’s just a monumentally difficult thing to do in a tournament that has a whopping great third-place safety net and, following the increase to 48 teams, at least one game in every group that any seeded team should win without much fuss.

Belgium are now testing this hypothesis. They’ve had two successive deeply unconvincing draws, while Nathan Ngoy’s straight red card midway through the second half of a drab and uninspiring goalless affair also leaves Belgium with a rotten ‘team conduct’ score. So tight is this group, which is halfway complete without any team winning a match, that this could yet become a relevant tie-breaker to settle final positions and quite possibly progress altogether.

The famous Golden Generation of Belgian football is long gone, either retired or miles away from the players they once were. The retired ones appear to have the right idea. The sight of Romelu Lukaku and Kevin De Bruyne lumbering ineffectively around the pitch against a team of plucky battlers like Iran is a sad one. This is no tournament for old men, and Belgium’s squad is full of them. They look awful tired.

And their last match of the group is against World Cup draw specialists New Zealand. Draw that and Belgium are in the lap of the gods.

On this evidence and all we know of New Zealand already, they could absolutely draw that game.

One thing in Belgium’s favour is that this group has just about the kindest possible set of potential last-32 routes.

The group winner gets a third-placed team. The runner-up gets whoever finishes second in Group D, which means Australia or Paraguay. Even the third-placed team might be okay, with one of their two potential outcomes if they qualify being the winner of Canada’s group. The other possibility is France, but don’t think about that for now.

In any case the brutal reality on the evidence we’ve seen so far is that this is a very old Belgium side in the worst possible tournament to be a very old side. They will probably still make it out of the group. They may well even still win it given nobody has yet taken a decisive step in this section. But there is no reason to expect them to go much further no matter how the draw falls.

There will always be a ‘what if?’ sense around Belgium’s failure to land any titles when they really did have a genuinely brilliant team. The fact they were still being called dark horses even when ranked literally number one in the world should not alter the fact they were genuine contenders for a good few tournament cycles there.

But no longer. A Belgium team that was so often referred to as dark horses when they weren’t has once again been wrongly handed that status for this tournament. Dark horses can’t be one of the genuine favourites like Belgium once were. But dark horses do at least need the potential to surprise you and win the thing.