France 1-0 Belgium: The Silent First Half and Zidane's Worrying Habit

In the 45th+2 minute, I put down my pen and wrote a short line in my notebook: first half, no goals, the sixth time in a row. On the screen, the French players walked into the tunnel without anyone bowing their head, without anyone hitting the wall. They are used to it. That habit is what kept me sitting after the final whistle, when the score had settled at 1-0 and the stands had moved on to talking about another name. I am old, but I can see the step before the touch. The team I watched last night showed no haste despite leading. It was waiting. And when a team as strong as France starts waiting, one should ask what they are waiting for. This was the second round of matches in Group One of the UEFA Nations League. France have six points from two matches under Zinedine Zidane; Belgium have three. That state of play placed the two teams in opposite moods: one enjoying a perfect start, the other accumulating pressure. But what caught my eye was a line of data rarely mentioned on television. In their last six matches, France have not scored a first-half goal once. The figure comes from Stats Foot and was repeated in the match report, but it was buried beneath a more attractive headline about a curse on Belgium. As for Belgium, this was their eighth consecutive defeat to France in competitive matches. Eight, not six. The headline said six meetings; the body text said eight competitive wins. The mismatch is not trivial. It shows the writer merged two different definitions, the number of encounters and the number of competitive matches, into a single sentence, then pushed it up into a phrase that sounds impressive. I do not like that method. But I did note the truth beneath it: Belgium, for more than a decade, have never found a way to beat France in a match that counted. The two teams entered this match with different calculations. France needed a win to stay top. Belgium needed points to avoid drifting away. After the whistle, the game unfolded in a way anyone who has watched football for years could predict: France held the ball, passed sideways, probed. Belgium dropped their block, held their distances, waited for a chance. The first half ended goalless. In the second half, France scored once and protected it to the end. It sounds simple. But that simple pattern has now repeated six times in a row, and the repetition is the real story. I stayed behind, rewound the first half twice, then the second half once. Three viewings, enough to verify. What I saw was not a poor attacking team. France still created chances, still put balls into the box, still produced shots. The problem was rhythm. They began the match at a pace lower than required, kept possession without breaking lines, and saved all their sharpness for after the break. France's first half is not built to score. It is built to read the opponent. I have tracked this kind of pattern in the V-League. In 2026, sitting in a Da Nang coffee shop reviewing 12 matches of Hanoi FC, I logged every transition and found that 37 percent of their goals came from counter-attacks lasting no more than eight seconds. But what stood out more was how they started: slowly, probing, accelerating only when the opponent exposed space. France played to a similar logic last night, only at a higher level and with a far more solid defence. The strong attack with the ball; the clever attack with space. France are playing the second way, but with a suspicious slowness. In the first half, their midfield circulated the ball in a safe pattern: more sideways than forward, more backward than forward. Line-breaking passes arrived late, usually only after the opponent tired or after Zidane adjusted. This is a sign of a control philosophy: keep risk low early, then raise pressure as the game opens up. What stood out was how France occupied space. In the first 15 minutes, they often pushed both full-backs high but not simultaneously, creating a safe corridor for circulation. On losing the ball, they immediately fell back into a four-man block in midfield, accepting space in front of them to preserve distances. That approach is efficient defensively, but it also means France need more time to shift from defence to attack. And time, in football, is the most expensive thing there is. I have seen this model somewhere else. In 2026, sitting in a Da Nang radio studio before the Belgium versus Japan round-of-16 match at the World Cup, I said on air that if Belgium fell behind, they would bring on Fellaini and Chadli to break Japan's high press. The match unfolded exactly that way. Japan led 2-0, Belgium made substitutions in the 65th and 74th minutes, and won 3-2. My lesson from that day was not that I predicted well. The lesson was: a good coach rarely plays all his cards from the start. The Japanese taught me patience; the Belgians taught me ruthlessness. And Zidane, in his first two matches with France, appears to be choosing both roads: patience in the first half, ruthlessness in the second. But patience is only good when it is a choice, not a habit. Six consecutive matches without a first-half goal is no longer a tactic. It has become a pattern. And patterns can be read. Picture an opponent who reads this. They walk into a match against France knowing that if they survive the first half, they are halfway there. They can pour everything into the opening 45 minutes to apply pressure, then accept dropping deep in the second half and hope for a set-piece moment. That is a method any underdog can apply. And in modern football, where every team has at least one player capable of producing a moment, letting an opponent survive the first half is an increasingly large risk. A lineup says nothing until the ball is lost. And the way France lost the ball in the first half last night showed they are willing to take risks in low positions, as long as the defensive line keeps its distances. That is a calculated gamble. But if an opponent has a striker who reads the moment and a midfielder who can play a 20-metre pass, the gamble can backfire. Belgium did not have that last night, or had it but did not dare use it. On Belgium, I must be blunt: their problem is bigger than one defeat. Eight consecutive competitive defeats to France is a psychological scar, but not only psychological. If it were only psychological, they would have broken it after two or three matches. Eight matches means there is a concrete gap in how they approach the game. In the first half last night, Belgium defended with discipline but without ambition. They dropped back, held their block, and barely dared to take risks on the ball. A team that walks out with a do-not-lose mindset instead of a must-win mindset tends to lose in very similar ways, again and again. More specifically, I see three Belgium problems. First, their midfield plays too many passes backward, slowing every attack and giving France time to reorganise their defensive block. Second, their forward line lacks runners into the space between France's centre-backs and full-backs, an area I saw left open several times in the first half. Third, when a counter-attacking chance appears, they commit only two or three players forward, not enough to pressure a French defence that has already dropped deep. But I do not want to criticise Belgium in the abstract. If I were their coach, what would I change? First, I would force the team to push higher for 20 minutes to test what France really want to do. Second, I would place organised pressure on France's midfield, where they tend to pass sideways early. Third, I would dedicate at least one player to running into the space between France's centre-backs and full-backs. None of those three requires new talent. They require courage. And this is where I will go against the crowd. The curse narrative is attractive, but it easily becomes an excuse not to analyse. When everyone says Belgium lose to France because of fate or bad luck, they skip the real question: why does Belgium's way of playing keep getting neutralised by the same opponent? Curses do not exist on a pitch. What exists are tactical choices, and those choices can be relearned. A golden generation does not automatically become a system that knows how to win specific matches. If Belgium want to break this run, they must stop believing in a curse and start believing in their own data. On the French side, there is a detail I want to flag: last night's win was Zidane's second match as head coach. Two matches. That is too small a sample to talk about a dynasty or a system. The media are painting a picture of a perfect start, and France are indeed winning. But a perfect start proves nothing beyond the fact that the team has enough individual quality to take points in its first two matches. To judge Zidane, I need to see how he handles going behind, how he adjusts when an opponent shuts down his strongest flank, and how he manages a match in which his team has no advantage. That is why I do not overrate this win, even though it matters for the standings. The more important thing lies elsewhere: France are winning, but winning with a formula that can be read. If they want to go far in a major tournament, they must learn to score before the first half ends. Not because the opening 45 minutes decide everything, but because a team cannot keep relying on second-half acceleration. In a knockout tie, a silent first half can be punished by a single goal. There is another angle I want to offer. Perhaps Zidane is deliberately choosing first-half slowness as a way to manage workload across the season. With a crowded calendar, letting the team play at low intensity for 45 minutes and then accelerate is a reasonable energy-saving strategy. But that strategy is only reasonable when the team gets a result. It becomes a problem the moment the opponent scores first. And this is something big teams often learn late: at the highest level, no strategy is immune to a goal in the tenth minute. So what is the concrete lesson for the next round? France will face Italy on October 2, 2026. Belgium will face Turkey in the same round. Those two matches will say more than any number about where the two teams really stand. If France again fail to score in the first half against Italy, the story stops being style and becomes a problem. If Belgium fail to beat Turkey, pressure on the coach and the key players will rise sharply, not because of one defeat, but because of a trend. I have a habit of writing down what needs verifying before every match. For France versus Italy, I will track three things: line-breaking passes in the first 30 minutes, the number of times France put the ball into the box before the 45th minute, and the pressing rhythm of France's midfield in the first 15 minutes. For Belgium versus Turkey, I will track the starting position of Belgium's back line: if they still sit deep from the start, the psychological problem remains. If they push up and accept risk, then a real change has begun. I am writing this on a morning in Da Nang, the sky outside grey. There is no match to watch right now, so I sit and rebuild each passage of play in my head, the way I always do in summers without football. When the pitch is empty, I find the counter-attack inside my own mind. And this time, that counter-attack belongs to no team on the field. It belongs to the question both teams must answer before the next round. France won. Belgium lost. But if France keep falling silent in the first half, and Belgium keep walking out with a do-not-lose mindset, both will have to explain the same thing: why a pattern that has been plainly seen keeps repeating itself. The ball is dead on the pitch, but intent lives in every metre of movement. And the first metre of any match always begins before the ball rolls.