Romelu Lukaku had his third goal of Euro 2024 chalked off in Belgium’s much-needed 2-0 win over Romania at RheinEnergieStadion.
The Red Devils ran out narrow winners on Saturday evening thanks to a wonderful goal from Youri Tielemans inside 73 seconds of kick off and an 80th minute strike from Kevin De Bruyne.
Remarkably, Tielemands’ goal was Belgium’s first in five hours of tournament football across Euro 2024 and the World Cup in 2022 – they scored just one goal in Qatar and were embarrassingly knocked out in the group stages.
Belgium have perhaps been a bit unfortunate to have not scored a few more goals at Euro 2024 thus far however, with Lukaku having three ruled out in the first two games of the tournament.
The Chelsea-owned forward had goals ruled out for offside and a controversial hand ball during Belgium’s shock 1-0 defeat at the hands of Slovakia during matchday one in Group E.
And rather incredibly, Lukaku saw yet another goal be ruled out by a VAR check in matchday two as well, with the towering forward being adjudged to have been narrowly offside before he side-footed beautifully into the bottom left corner of the net.
Speaking about his star forward’s unfortunate streak in front of goal prior to the clash with Romania, Belgium manager Domenico Tedesco said:
“We spoke yesterday after training, but we always speak because he is one of the main players in the squad,” Tedesco revealed to reporters on Friday. “It is important [to understand] what he is thinking, I ask him a lot for his opinion.
“He just needs to score one goal [and more will come]. He did in fact [score] twice, but they were cancelled. We all want him to score six goals from six chances, but that is not realistic, even if he has the quality to do it.”
Ultimately, Lukaku’s disallowed goal wouldn’t have an impact on the result on Saturday, with Tielemans and De Bruyne’s strikes being enough to see off a spirited Romania outfit.
The result now means that every team in Group E will head into the final matchday all locked level on three points. Belgium are set to face off against Ukraine in their final game at MHPArena at the same time as Romania will go head to head with Slovakia at Deutsche Bank Park on Wednesday evening.
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