"It wasn't Courtois' fault that Madrid didn't play well"

The goalkeeper received a lot of criticism at the start of the season. These were unfair, according to Vandereycken. "They were waiting to find something small to criticise Courtois about.  They weren't football arguments. The bad start wasn't his fault, but that the team wasn't playing well," he said in an interview with 'AS'. 

"Sometimes he was criticised for no reason. He may not have always been in very good shape, but it wasn't his fault that Madrid didn't play well... If he had made a lot of mistakes, they could have said it was his fault, but this is not so," he stated.

And he has a theory for this: "Courtois is criticised because a lot of people wanted and had a lot of contact with Keylor Navas." Vandereycken thinks that the Belgian has better qualities than the Costa Rican. "Keylor won the Champions League, but but there came a time when a better goalkeeper showed up and had to play instead of him," he said.

He also talked about Hazard, the player he made his debut with, and his adaptation to Madrid. "The players need half a season or an entire season to become a new team. Eden came from another country. Football and tactics are also different in Spanish football. He wasn't at his best in the first three months, but he will do fantastic things in the next few years," he said.

The former Belgian coach is clear: Hazard will do his best soon. "There's still room for improvement. He was playing very well before he was injured. It must have been difficult for Eden to adapt because he wasn't always surrounded by the same team-mates," he concluded.