AL RAYYAN, Qatar — John Herdman insisted his Canada crew “showed they belong” on the World Cup regardless of dropping their Group F opener 1-0 to Belgium on Thursday.
Alphonso Davies missed a Tenth-minute penalty as Les Rouges have been the higher facet for lengthy intervals solely to concede a minute earlier than the interval as Michy Batshuayi rifled a shot previous Milan Borjan.
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Canada ended with 21 pictures to Belgium’s 9 as they pushed the crew ranked second by FIFA all the best way of their first World Cup match for 36 years.
“They showed tonight that they do belong here,” stated Herdman. “It’s been a long time since we’ve been back here. Our fans were football fans but tried to own the stadium tonight.
“We got here into that recreation with a few objectives: to play fearless and to entertain. We had another objectives, which was to create some firsts however we by no means fairly bought to these moments.
“I feel the group stage is broad open now given the results of Morocco and Croatia. With a performance like this, I just said to the players: straight onto the next task.”
Hardman added in a separate tv interview: “I told them they belong here and we’re going to go and ‘F’ Croatia. That’s as simple as it gets.”
He additionally revealed that former astronaut Chris Hadfield gave the gamers an inspirational pre-match team-talk.
“He had a good chat, talking about his experiences representing the country in the military and as an astronaut and I think he inspired them tonight to commit 100% to whatever the strategy was,” Herdman stated.
Kevin de Bruyne was given the official man of the match award regardless of an underwhelming show and he stated: “I don’t think I played a great game. I don’t know why I got the trophy, maybe because of the name.”
His coach Roberto Martinez stated the efficiency was technically the worst of his six-year tenure, but added that Belgium have been worthy winners.
“Was it technically the worst performance? Yes. The worst game? No, because it’s a win at the World Cup,” he stated. “We had to show a different side of our game and had to defend really well.
“And we took an excellent aim. You could give large respect to Canada’s efficiency and what we did is that we did not do properly what we have been presupposed to do whereas they did properly what they have been presupposed to do. However we deserve the win.”
Data from Reuters was used on this report.