Of the four survivors from 2014 and 2018, 34-year-old Courtois has played every minute of this tournament, but De Bruyne, Lukaku and Witsel have featured far less regularly.<\/p>\n
Central midfielder Witsel, 37, who left relegated Girona at the end of the La Liga season, was brought on for a single minute at the end of the win over the USA. <\/p>\n
At 33, Lukaku has scored an impressive three goals but has done so by playing fewer than 50% of minutes, often coming on as a substitute and taking advantage of a tired defence reeling from the strong pressing of 25-year-old Atalanta forward Charles De Ketelaere.<\/p>\n
And De Bruyne, now 35, was injured during the Senegal game – before his departure Belgium had won one out of three matches, but since then they have won twice and scored seven goals in roughly 130 minutes of play.<\/p>\n
Full-back Thomas Meunier also played in the 2018 tournament, but not 2014, and his minutes played have decreased as the tournament has gone on.<\/p>\n
None of that is to say the more senior players are not contributing – Courtois remains one of the world’s best goalkeepers, Lukaku’s goals have been crucial, and De Bruyne’s performances were among the team’s best before his unfortunate injury.<\/p>\n
But their role in the squad is changing, with a greater reliance on them making the difference in key moments rather than taking responsibility for the overall quality of the team’s performances.<\/p>\n
So far at least, Garcia and Belgium appear to handling the transition better than many teams do when their stars begin to fade.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Of the four survivors from 2014 and 2018, 34-year-old Courtois has played every minute of this tournament, but…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":542736,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[61,60,112],"class_list":["post-542735","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-sports","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/542735","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=542735"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/542735\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/542736"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=542735"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=542735"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=542735"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}