The Netherlands as good as booked their place at the 2026 World Cup with a draw against Poland in Warsaw.<\/p>\n
They remain three points above the Poles at the top of Group G, with a stronger goal difference by 13 goals, going into Monday’s final fixtures.<\/p>\n
Poland, who are guaranteed a play-off place at least, took the lead when Robert Lewandowski played in Jakub Kaminski, who slotted through Bart Verbruggen’s legs.<\/p>\n
But Ronald Koeman’s side were level early in the second half when Donyell Malen’s header was saved and the nation’s record scorer Memphis Depay scored from the rebound.<\/p>\n
That was the 31-year-old Corinthians forward’s eighth goal of these World Cup qualifiers, only behind Norway’s Erling Haaland with 14.<\/p>\n
The Netherlands just need a point at home to Lithuania to be sure of qualification, but even if they lose Poland would need to win in Malta with a goal difference swing of 13 goals.<\/p>\n
Finland lost 1-0 to Malta earlier on Friday to end their play-off hopes.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Netherlands as good as booked their place at the 2026 World Cup with a draw against Poland…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":140241,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[42,43,40,38,41,39],"class_list":{"0":"post-140240","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-headlines","8":"tag-headlines","9":"tag-news","10":"tag-top-news","11":"tag-top-stories","12":"tag-topnews","13":"tag-topstories"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/140240","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=140240"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/140240\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/140241"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=140240"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=140240"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=140240"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}