The Inner Enemy: Hazard, Henry and Belgium's Conspiracy Against France | Bleacher's report

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The seven years that Hazard spent in Lille, where he won a double in Ligue 1 and the Coupe de France in 2011, gave him a deep attachment to the country of Zidane.

"" It is perfectly integrated with the culture of the north of France and the traditions of the north, "Bleacher Report tells François Vitali, the former director of youth development in Lille (19659005 More than that, he has become "Nordic", according to local customs, his way of being and his way of behaving with others. "

Press conference before the semifinal of Belgium against France Tuesday, Hazard's teammate at Chelsea Olivier Giroud describes him as "almost a Frenchman." Although he is now captain of Belgium, Hazard has already admitted that he knows the words of the French national anthem, La Marseillaise better than those of its Belgian counterpart, La Brabanconne But it was also very clear that the option to play for France has never been on the table.

"He never thought to play in. France, "says Vitali, who is now working as a sports director for Belgian club Cercle Brugge.

"His parents chose to send him to Lille because he would receive a good education [football] not because he could become French one day and wear the colors of the school. team of France, for them, and for him, he is Belgian, he is proud to be Belgian and he will be very happy to play against France. "

The danger will not only be the l & # 39; one of the main threats for France in St. Petersburg, it is also a symbol of multiple links two teams that make Tuesday's match the most incestuous semi-final in the history of the World Cup.

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Before the kickoff of Krestovsky Stadium, Hazard should catch up with central defender Adil Rami, with whom he spent four years in Lille.

Hazard's younger brother, Thorgan, could be sp I had a word with Raphael Varane, the pair having played together in the youth team in Lens. Belgian striker Michy Batshuayi is sure to have a joke for Steve Mandanda, Benjamin Mendy and Florian Thauvin, who were his teammates during his two seasons in Marseille.

If Thomas Meunier was not suspended for Tuesday's match, he would have scored his former Paris Saint-Germain teammate, Blaise Matuidi.

There are also many club links, many of which have been forged in England. Hazard, Batshuayi and Thibaut Courtois play alongside Giroud and N & Golo Kante in Chelsea. Toby Alderweireld, Jan Vertonghen and Mousa Dembele are the teammates of Tottenham of France goaltender Hugo Lloris. Romelu Lukaku and Marouane Fellaini play with Paul Pogba at Manchester United. Lukaku and Pogba are on vacation together, while Adnan Januzaj, who has gone through the United ranks with Pogba, has described France's number six as a "brother."

Members of the Belgian Roberto Martínez football team played in France were walking on a well-worn path. On the other side of the border, countless Belgian footballers have made career, from Robert De Veen, who dominated Lille and Lens in the interwar period, to the great Enzo Scifo, who has evolved for Bordeaux and Auxerre. the title of Ligue 1 with Monaco in 1997.

C & # 39; was a Belgian, who led the first triumph of France in the European Cup, Raymond Goethals having been in the trench of Marseille when Basile Boli In 1993, the French won 1-0 at AC Milan in Munich.

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The French and Belgians share much more than a border, a language and a passion for cycling, which means that despite its global significance, Tuesday's match will have a distinct local flavor. The team says it's like "going on a far-off trip, stumbling on a beach paradise and finding a guy from the office lying there on a towel."

For decades, Belgians have been the target of French jokes, mainly because of the differences between French spoken in France and the nasal and truncated French spoken in the French-speaking parts of Belgium. The Belgians, for their part, mock French pretensions to sophistication in the same way as the rest of the "We often find that the French claim and the French tend to find us ridiculous, especially because of our accent," sums up Charles Michel, Prime Minister Belgian, in an interview with the French newspaper Le Journal de Dimanche. [19659005] Gunter Jacob, a Belgian who worked in France as a sports director in Marseille, says that France's opinions in Belgium differ depending on whether you are in French-speaking Wallonia or Dutch-speaking Flanders.

I remember that we have two sides in Belgium: the French side and the Dutch side. "

" The rivalry of the Dutch-speaking side is with Holland. The rivalry on the francophone side is more with France. I'm on the Dutch side, so you do not understand much. It's a friendly rivalry. "

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In terms of football, the rivalry between Belgium and France began on May 1, 1904, when the two national teams faced each other in a friendly match that represented the first official match for both countries. nearly 1500 spectators in Uccle, hometown of Belgian defenders Vincent Kompany and Dedryck Boyata, and finished in a draw 3-3

Belgium won 7-0 when the teams clashed a year later, their cause aided by the fact that French goalkeeper Georges Crozier had to leave the field in the 65th minute to take a train to his barracks in Paris (he returned late and was sentenced to 15 days in prison.)

The teams clashed almost every year until the end of the 1960s. A meet It was particularly poignant at Christmas Eve 1944 when Belgium came to Paris where it will play the first official match since the liberation of the French capital four months earlier. All the profits went to the victims of the war.

Tuesday's game will be by far the most important meeting between Belgium and France. Just like today, the two countries produced generations of extremely talented footballers in the mid-1980s, but although they have met at successive major tournaments, none of the matches has been a direct elimination game.

Michel Platini scored a Piledriver hat-trick, right-footed penalty, header, while France beat Belgium 5-0 at Stade de la Beaujoire in Nantes during a group match at 1984 European Championship, which propelled the host country in the semi-finals of a tournament

Argentina's Diego Maradona and West Germany's Karl-Karl Heinz Rummenigge prevented France and Belgium from competing in the World Cup finals in Mexico two years later. The two teams met in Puebla for third place, France winning 4-2 after extra time thanks to goals from Bernard Genghini and Manuel Amoros.

Despite a less impressive football, Belgium holds the high ground. In the rivalry, with 30 wins to 24 in France, and it is understandable that in the country it is a moment now or never for the national team

"It is obvious that They [France] have a list of honors that we have not yet and that we will probably never have, "says Jacob." But now we have a very good chance with a very good generation to maybe go to the finals and maybe win. "

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No one in Tuesday's stadium will feel more vividly the peculiarities of the occasion than Thierry Henry, the scorer of all time of France, who will be sitting in the Belgian arsenal as one of the assistants of Martínez.

Henry, who scored 51 goals in 123 international appearances the, is considered one of the greatest players in France and there is perplexity in France at the thought that he is plotting the fall of the national team he was wearing the colors for so many years and with such distinction.

"It's going to be strange because he's French and he will be in the opposition team, I think it will be strange for him too.", Said Didier Deschamps, l & rsquo; Coach from France, who played alongside De Henry in the teams that triumphed at the 1998 World Cup and the 2000 European Championship.

Despite all the success that he knew with France, Henry's international career ended under a cloud, his legacy tarnished by his infamous handball against the Republic of Ireland in November 2009 and his involvement in the catastrophic Cup campaign of the world that followed it.

Deliberately or not, he distanced himself from his homeland in the following years, spending four and a half years playing football The United States then moved to the United Kingdom, where he completes his coaching badges and launches his television reporter career.

Noel Le Graet, president of the French Football Federation, conceded that his organization "lost sight of" Henri. Asked once why he joined the Royal Belgian Football Association and not his French equivalent, Henry replied: "No one has ever offered me anything."

Henry seems to have established a particularly close relationship with Lukaku, on whom Belgium counts goals that will end the tournament in France. This will be one of the countless intriguing sub-intrigues in a truly singular semifinal.