We can bring down Belgium’s golden generation, says French No 1 Lloris
they are a great team. It is a fantastic generation and in order to beat them we will have to play a great match.
“We know there are going to be difficult moments and we’ll have to be ready to suffer.
“But we will be ready because we have an extremely good state of mind and it is the semifinals in the World Cup. It is an opportunity in our careers and we have to grab it with both hands.”
The 31-year-old goalkeeper has three Tottenham teammates in the Belgium squad and there will likely be a number of cases of Premier League club colleagues facing each other during tonight’s game in St Petersburg.
France boss Didier Deschamps said: “We know them, they know us.
“The peculiarity is there are many players on my team who have their own club teammates facing them. So they know each other. It’s an advantage on both sides.”
In terms of familiarity, there is also the fact Belgium have former France forward Thierry Henry working as an assistant coach under Roberto Martinez.
Deschamps, who was Henry’s captain in the French squad that won the 1998 World Cup, said: “Of course, it is a difficult situation, it really is not easy for him and it does happen sometimes. You are part of the enemy team.
“He did know that from the time he was joining the management team and becoming an assistant to Martinez, that that could happen. But on the personal front it is with great pleasure that I’m going to see him.”
Meanwhile, Martinez has admitted it took him two years to give Belgium’s bunch of individual superstars the belief that they can go on and win their first World Cup together. Belgium go into their semi-final against France in St Petersburg on a high after a quarter-win win over Brazil which shattered the notion that their big names are impossible to unite in one team.
Martinez said: “Now I think a lot of questions have been answered in saying that this is a team, not a group of individuals. They made a commitment of trying to help each other become a high-performance squad and to come together to be as good as we can.”