Day: June 1, 2018

Belgium’s talented squad head to this summer’s World Cup as favourites yet again and this game offers Roberto Martinez the chance to test his selected players against reigning European champions, Portugal.

Portugal defended their way to victory in Euro 2016, and they have selected almost the same group of defenders, however, it seems very unlikely for them to record the same kind of success at the World and seeing them throw away a 2-goal lead to draw 2-2 against Tunisia in their last game would bother their fans.

The Portuguese major concern should be their ageing defence, however, with Christiano Ronaldo yet to join them, their lack of quality on the attack has also become evident. They would be banking on Bernado Silva lead them to victory here.

Belgium would be happy to see how old the Portuguese defenders are especially as they are a team buzzing with attacking talents. Belgium bagged 43 goals in 10 qualifying games and they have netted in 19 of their last 20 friendly games ahead of this game. The Belgians have also been boosted by the return to fitness of Romelu Lukaku who netted 11 times in the qualifiers, and he has netted in his last six Belgium games.

Portugal beat Belgium at home 2-1 the last time these teams met in 2016.

Although they failed to qualify for the FIFA World Cup in Russia, Austria come into this game in top form having avoided defeats in their last 6 games and have kept a clean sheet in their last 3 matches leading up to this encounter. They would, however, need to do better than they did in their last match against Russia which they won, if they want to get a result against the defending world champions here.

Germany are surprisingly in a bad form leading up to this game as they have failed to win any of their last five matches. However, this game would be their first warm up before the World Cup and their fans would be hoping for a better performance from them here. The result is not useful for the Germans anyway so we expect their manager to do some experimentations here.

Germany’s poor form in their previous matches has been down to their bluntness in attack as they managed just 1 shot on target against Brazil. They have named a strong offensive team and this game should show what they would do at the World Cup.

Germany have an excellent result in this fixture as they have won all of the last nine games involving these teams.