Thibaut Courtois has told Belgium to summon the spirit of 2018 and create a \u201chuge upset\u201d when they clash with Spain in a blockbuster World Cup quarter-final on Saturday.<\/p>\n
Staid and scruffy for large parts of their group fixtures, and incredibly fortunate to survive a round-of-32 fright against Senegal, a Belgium team fuelled by a sense of indignation ignited their tournament with a destructive 4-1 victory over the United States in the round of 16.<\/p>\n
The owner of 114 international caps, goalkeeper Courtois acknowledged that Spain would start the Los Angeles encounter as favourites, but he recalled how Belgium ignored their underdogs tag to beat heavily fancied Brazil at the same stage eight years ago.<\/p>\n
Ready for his 21st World Cup finals appearance, Courtois said: \u201cBrazil were favoured against us, and, maybe, they had more individual quality in the team.<\/p>\n
\u201cI feel we are a great team, all together now, and we are fighting. [The match] against Senegal showed our ability to keep believing until the end, and that\u2019s also a strength at the World Cup.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s a nice thing to also play well, but the most important thing is to win and to compete.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Thibaut Courtois has told Belgium to summon the spirit of 2018 and create a \u201chuge upset\u201d when they…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":27771,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[4],"tags":[15524,7,370,15523,6219,69,5731,115,13649,15424,2323,3208,4570,116,2833],"class_list":["post-27770","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-belgium","tag-atletico","tag-belgium","tag-brazil","tag-carson-sports-park","tag-courtois","tag-europe","tag-fifa","tag-france","tag-los-angeles","tag-loyola-marymount-university","tag-real-madrid","tag-royal-belgian-football-association","tag-senegal","tag-spain","tag-usa"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@be\/116893475517235405","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/be\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27770","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/be\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/be\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/be\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/be\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=27770"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/be\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27770\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/be\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/27771"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/be\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=27770"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/be\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=27770"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/be\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=27770"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}