The silence lasted a month
Rudi Garcia waited. Then he talked.
Eighteen months in charge of Belgium, a World Cup that ended in the quarter-finals against Spain, a 2-1 exit, and then the door. Nothing from him after that. Until this interview with L’Equipe, where the former Marseille and Lyon coach goes back over what he says wrecked the campaign: bodies breaking down.
He is not calling it bad luck. He is naming the medical staff.
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“They lack real day-to-day experience”
“We could have done better without all the injury and illness problems, for Jeremy Doku, for example. Vincent knew that. I had asked him to manage them.”
Then the part that will travel. “The medical staff are good people, competent in their field. But they lack real day-to-day experience at professional clubs. They would have had different attitudes or different calls, and they could have leaned on my experience at the top level.”
Competent, in the wrong setting. That is the charge. A federation runs on a different clock than a club does, and the way you handle a player carrying a knock changes with it. Doku, whose body has held him back for several seasons now, is the case Garcia picks to make the point.
Sending a generation off before it faded out
On the record itself, he takes a different view.
Romelu Lukaku, Kevin De Bruyne, Thibaut Courtois. Three names carrying a whole era, the side that reached the semi-finals in 2018 before leaving everyone flat in 2022. Garcia’s version is that he walked them to the end, one last major tournament together, rather than letting those international careers dribble away one retirement at a time.
What is left on the sheet is a quarter-final loss to the eventual world champions. And the line that never quite goes away: it could have been better.
The Red Devils have already turned the page. The row over the federation’s medical department has not started closing.
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