Germany lost to Belgium at home
Scoring: Fullkrug pen 44', Gnabry 87' - Carrasco 6', Lukaku 9', De Bruyne 78'
"22 players competed for the ball for 90 minutes, and in the end, the Belgians won," the Belgian team's Twitter account joked in the post-match announcement.
On the German side, the general feeling after the match was "emptiness", "bewilderment" and "disappointment", as T-online commented. Not being excited for long thanks to an easy 2-0 victory over Peru in a friendly match at Mainz on May 25, the stars under coach Hansi Flick returned to the difficult reality as soon as they met an opponent equal to Belgium. Germany still appears with the image of a fragile, lack of ideas that they are desperate to shake off after the defeat at the World Cup at the end of last year.
"We were too cautious, too defensive and couldn't put pressure on the opponent," Flick told German radio RTL after the game. Captain Joshua Kimmich went into more detail when admitting the team "made too many mistakes, lost the ball too easily". On the Belgian side, captain Kevin de Bruyne also shared this view: "We played well, especially in the first half hour."
Statistics show that Germany holds the ball 54% and finishes twice as many as Belgium - 16 to 7. But the two teams have the same number of shots on goal, and the away team has a much better performance. Belgium opened the scoring in the sixth minute in a quick counter-attack. Yannick Carrasco received the ball from De Bruyne and then went past Marius Wolf and defeated Ter Stegen.
Less than four minutes later, the gap was doubled. This time, De Bruyne poked a hole to completely eliminate the German defense, allowing Romelu Lukaku to break the offside trap to escape to defeat Ter Stegen. This goal shows that Lukaku is in very high form when he has scored four goals in just the last two matches. The 30-year-old striker was the owner of a hat-trick when Belgium defeated Sweden 3-0 in the Euro 2024 qualifying match on March 25.
For the first time, Germany was down 0-2 in just 10 minutes since a friendly 1-4 loss at Italy in March 2006. And Flick's army was almost paralyzed with this early score disadvantage. Only by luck, they did not concede more goals from midfielder Dodi Lukebakio's situations when midfielder Dodi Lukebakio missed the post in the 19th minute and Lukaku hit the bar in the 21st minute.
It took until the 44th minute for Germany to shorten the lead from striker Niclas Fullkrug's penalty after Lukaku let the ball touch his hand in a corner. This 1-2 equalizer helped Germany have more vitality to play better in the second half, but the attack continued to be ineffective. While still engrossed in finding the second equalizer, Germany left a gap behind and was punished in the 78th minute. In the speed ball, Leandro Trossard stretched to clear the deck for De Bruyne to score to make it 3-1. for Belgium.
Efforts in the rest of the time only helped Germany shorten the lead to one goal from Serge Gnabry's close-range kick in the 87th minute. Gnabry could have done better, with a monologue that had to come in. five Belgian players, but at the last touch, the Bayern striker sent the ball narrowly wide of the post.
"The results show that the two teams are on two different levels. Germany can only see Belgium playing football," the German legend who won the 1990 World Cup Lothar Matthaus commented on RTL after the match.
