Like his colleagues, De Bruyne did not perform well in Qatar, narrowly beating Canada (1-0), losing to Morocco (0-2) and drawing 0-0 in the all-or-nothing match against Croatia . Although Romelu Lukaku was not in the finish at the time.
“The World Cup was just not good enough for us,” it sounded very honest at the turntable. “We just have to accept that and hope we do better next time.”
“If we are honest, we only played well in the second half against Croatia. Those other matches were not so good.”
“Somehow we have no reason to complain and we just have to accept that as a team.”
The conclusion is that the World Cup was a big disappointment for the Red Devils: “It just wasn’t good enough, but I don’t think the last 2 years have been really great”, De Bruyne looks back critically.
“If you look at the last period of matches, we haven’t actually won that much and we haven’t played really good football for a while.”
Since the lost quarter-final at the European Championship last year against Italy, Belgium has won 9 times, drawn 4 times and lost 5 times.
“Somehow we’ve been trying to look to do better.” But that didn’t work out. “I think it just wasn’t in this tournament.”
De Bruyne also did the interview in his Manchester City outfit. There it was again immediately boink for the midfielder. In an exhibition game against Girona last week, he was immediately Man of the Match with a goal and an assist. And earlier this week he knocked Liverpool out of the League Cup with 2 assists. He served Haaland for the 1-0 and Aké for the decisive 3-2.
