A negative image of Belgium was shown at this Euro. Fans forgot where Belgium comes from?“ Yannick Carrasco said out loud what the locker room was thinking after the sad 0-0 against Ukraine. Kevin De Bruyne limited himself to a cynic: “We need them.” Good thing he didn’t voice his thoughts. He may have said to himself, under the influence of emotion: “After the Euro, I don’t give a damn: I’ll be in Saudi Arabia, I’ll think about my body and my family: I’m 33, I’m quitting the national team.”
Kevin De Bruyne who is whistled by his own supporters. We had to go very far back in the archives to find a scenario like this. At halftime of a Genk – Lokeren (0-1) in February 2012 (he was twenty years old), he declared in front of the Telenet microphone: “I don’t understand why I get whistled for every bad pass. At least I give my all. Some teammates, on the other hand… I’m embarrassed in their place. Things really aren’t going well in our team.” At the end of this season, he left for Chelsea.
It was his idea to gain time, with Vertonghen. He felt personally targeted.
Thirteen years later, Kevin the captain has become a man. He bites his chew before criticizing his teammates or even his supporters. But he is no less disgusted by behavior that he describes as unacceptable on the part of the 12,000 Belgians. It was he who, after applauding the supporters for the first time after the referee’s final whistle, signaled to the others to turn back, which made the decibels rise even higher. De Bruyne felt personally targeted, because it was he who (with Jan Vertonghen) decided to gain time during the corners for Belgium at the end of the match.
Back to the first of three corners, in the 86th minute. Vertonghen sprints 50 meters towards De Bruyne to whisper something in his ear; a scene that is not broadcast on television. We quickly understand the content of the message: De Bruyne plays the short corner with Bakayoko, then serves Vertonghen, who gives a back pass (quite risky, with the right foot) towards Casteels. The Belgian public whistles for the first time.
The Ukrainians easily recovered the ball and created two chances in the following minutes: Malinovskyi’s big strike into Castagne’s ribs and Sudakov’s shot from too far in the centre, which had managed to penetrate the Devils’ rectangle.
In the 93rd minute, De Bruyne shouts at Bakayoko to come and help him monopolise the ball near the corner flag. The two force another corner but the whistles get louder when, this time, the Ukrainians are awarded a goal kick. The fans have understood it for a long time: Belgium do not want to win, while the path to the final seemed wide open via the other half of the table. “We should have taken risks in the 94th minute and been eliminated on the counterattack?”asked De Bruyne in front of the VRT microphone.
It would be sad to see the best Belgian player of all time leave the Devils on a bad note.
In 1994, after a Belgium-Spain (1-4), the whistles from the crowd (especially Anderlecht fans, since the match was played at the Parc Astrid) at him had pushed Franky Van der Elst to (temporarily) say goodbye to the national team. The tears of his son Tim in the locker room had broken his heart. At eight years old, Mason Milian De Bruyne is probably too young to understand what happened at the end of the game against Ukraine. He cries especially when his dad loses a match. But Kevin doesn’t need his son to make such a decision.
If Kevin decides to say goodbye to the Devils – we must also take into account a possible international retirement of Lukaku – the whistles from the supporters will not have been his only argument. But they might have been the last straw. An exploit against France can obviously change everything and above all let’s hope that the idea of playing a World Cup in the USA, a country of his dreams, will help him postpone his farewells. It would be a shame to see the best player in the history of Belgian football, the idol of all children, leave the national team on a bad note.
