Belgium have won only one of their five encounters with japan although that came in their last meeting in November 2017. Tonight, both teams had everything to play for in the knock out stage and clearly the better team prevailed.
Final Score Japan 2 – Belgium 1
Japan showed almost Spain-like patience when they had the ball, until they run out of patience. But then the first half was rather drab with neither of the teams not having a single shot on target for so long. The first half ended with both team failing to score.
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But into the second half goals started to flow in. At 48th minute, Japan took the lead. Vertonghen failed to cut out Shibasaki’s throughball and Haraguchi latched onto the end of the pass, firing a driven shot into the far corner of the net beyond Courtois’ reach.
4 minutes later, Japan increased the lead. Kangana collected the ball on the edge of the box and poked a pass back to Inui, who shaped up to shoot and fired an unstoppable effort into the bottom right hand corner.
On 69th minute, Belgium got one back as Japan failed to deal with a corner and Vertonghen looped a superb header over the head of Kawashima and into the far corner.
Five minutes later, Marouane Fellaini squared things up for Belgium when Hazard curled a superb cross into the middle where Fellaini, off the bench rises above Japanese defence to head home.
With just 15 minutes to the end of match, it seemed like another match going in to the extra time but Belgium, in the dying moments of the game,at 94th minute scored a goal to make it 3-2 in favour of Belgium. De Bruins charged through the middle, rolled a ball out wide to Meunière and the low cross was brilliantly left by Lukaku and Chadli had the goal at his mercy.
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