Mark Langdon: No luck for Roberto Martinez in knockout draws

In Berlin on July 14 one nation will be celebrating becoming champions of Europe. Tales of how they did it will follow.

Long reads on why the team camp was so successful, how a specific diet played its part; radio phone-ins on the genius of the successful manager and how his attention to detail proved to be the difference in sorting the wheat from the chaff. It's likely other international teams will follow the template in future tournaments and yet it is not likely to have been much different from teams who failed doing similar things with different outcomes.

Football is a low-scoring sport and there will always be some kind of randomness. The shorter the race, the more likely an upset. Wolves can beat Manchester City in one game but they are not going to get more points over 38 fixtures.

International tournaments are a sprint as much as anything else and you need luck. One look at the outright betting for Euro 2024 highlights that - England are proudly sitting as favourites after finding themselves on the opposite side of the draw to most of the elite nations despite mainly stinking the place out in Germany. The other five teams from the top six of the ante-post betting are housed away from England after France and Belgium failed to win their groups.

Gareth Southgate's luck in the draw is unrivalled. In 2018 England had a quarter-final against Sweden and a semi-final with Croatia, while at Euro 2020 the path again fell nicely with Ukraine in the quarter-finals and Denmark in the semi-finals.

So perhaps spare a thought for Roberto Martinez, who has been in part blamed for failing to win a tournament with Belgium's golden generation and must be fearing the worst with a similarly stacked Portugal side as they now probably need to beat France and then either Germany or Spain just to reach the final. For Southgate the hardest it can be on paper is Italy in the quarter-finals and Netherlands in the semis.

This is nothing new for Martinez. At the 2018 World Cup he won his group with Belgium, beat Japan in the last 16 and then the highly-fancied Brazilian side in the quarter-finals before losing to France 1-0 in the narrowest of semi-final losses.

Had Belgium beaten France they would have been strong favourites to see off Croatia in the final and Martinez would have been hailed a hero.

Three years later at the delayed Euro 2020 his Belgium side once again did their job, finished top of their group, and were looking forward to a nice last-16 tie with a third-placed team. That third-placed team was Portugal, who were in a group of death which also contained Germany and France.

Belgium still beat Portugal 1-0 and then ran into Italy, losing 2-1 to one of the goals of the tournament due to the individual brilliance of Lorenzo Insigne.

Fine margins. Massive consequences.

His team was cooked by the winter World Cup of 2022, although Martinez still became a laughing stock for not qualifying from a group containing Morocco and Croatia. That's the same Morocco and Croatia who went on to reach the semi-finals in Qatar.

Martinez is no Pep Guardiola and many will consider him fortunate to have been handed the opportunity to lead Belgium and Portugal. However, he has barely put a foot wrong in any of the finals and still fallen short. That's international tournaments in a nutshell.

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