Belgium coach Rudi Garcia strongly criticised FIFA’s decision on Sunday to suspend a one-match ban for United States striker Folarin Balogun, saying the unprecedented move was against the spirit of the game.<\/p>\n
“I didn’t know that at the FIFA World Cup the fifth of July is now the first of April and it’s April Fool’s Day,” Garcia told reporters ahead of Monday’s last-16 clash.<\/p>\n
He referred to a statement issued by the Royal Belgian Football Association (RBFA), which said it was “astonished” by FIFA’s decision and was “investigating all potential options”.<\/p>\n
Garcia added: “We are not defending the national team or the federation, we are defending football with its ethics and integrity.”<\/p>\n
He and goalkeeper Thibaut Courtois both insisted the decision would have no impact on Belgium’s preparation, though Courtois conceded the timing of the decision was a surprise.<\/p>\n
“For us as players, nothing changes,” Courtois said. “We focus on the game, to win on the pitch, whoever plays.”<\/p>\n
Garcia, though, grew visibly irritated with questions about the decision, eventually interjecting: “Please don’t waste your time talking about that. We want to focus on sporting matters.”<\/p>\n
Courtois is one of the few remaining members of Belgium’s ‘golden generation’ which reached the quarter-finals in 2014, beating the US along the way, and semi-finals in 2018.<\/p>\n
A slew of retirements has shorn the Belgium squad of years of experience, but Courtois backed their younger players to write their own legacy.<\/p>\n
“I think this is a new era for us,” he said. “It’s true that there are some players from the golden era, as some would like to say.<\/p>\n
“But the truth is that the World Cup in Qatar (in 2022) for us was not that good, we were eliminated in the group stage.<\/p>\n
“Now we have another generation with younger people, new people, willing to do great things and writing in the history pages for Belgium.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Belgium coach Rudi Garcia strongly criticised FIFA’s decision on Sunday to suspend a one-match ban for United States…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":511546,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[111,139,69,213],"class_list":["post-511545","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-sports","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/511545","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=511545"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/511545\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/511546"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=511545"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=511545"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=511545"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}