Archive November 4, 2025

Who: Barcelona vs. Club Brugge
What: Champions League group stage
Where: Jan Breydel Stadium, Brugge, Belgium
When: Wednesday at 9pm (20:00 GMT)
How to follow: We’ll have all the build-up on Al Jazeera Sport from 17:00 GMT in advance of our live text commentary stream.

Barcelona are unbeaten at home this season, winning six and drawing one of their seven games at Jan Breydel Stadium, despite being firmly in the mix against Club Brugge.

Although they lost to Atalanta and Bayern Munich, the Belgians still managed to win 4-1 over Monaco earlier in the group stage.

Club Brugge are currently second in the Belgian Pro League, three points clear of league leaders Union Saint-Gilloise, and they won 2-1 at home over Denders over the weekend.

Barcelona have won six Champions League games this season, winning either way against Olympiacos or Newcastle United, to lose 2-1 to Paris Saint-Germain, who are also in the Champions League.

Lamine Yamal also scored early as Barcelona bounced back from their Clasico defeat on Sunday, beating Elche 3-1 at home to reclaim second place in the Spanish league.

Barcelona retaliate

Barcelona lost 2-1 to Real Madrid in the first Clasico of the season to lose, and Ferran Torres and Marcus Rashford both scored against Elche.

After the win over Elche, where Barca were dominant but looked vulnerable, coach Hansi Flick said, “I saw many things we did well, but I also saw some things we didn’t do well.”

The three points were earned because it was a difficult match. We must constantly improve. With this victory, we have greater confidence. We must continue, though, because it is another step. We must consider the upcoming games with optimism, and I’m happy.

Flick wants Rashford to exhibit more clinical behavior.

Flick believes the England international should have scored even more goals despite Rashford having already scored six goals in all competitions since joining Barcelona on loan from Manchester United in July.

One or two goals more will be beneficial for him, Flick told reporters, “when you see the chances he has.”

“I’m happy he shows this level of skill, and I’m confident in his ability.” He is a very significant player for both the fans and the club, as well as the teammates.

Rashford acknowledged that his decision-making could be improved.

“On the pitch, I just make sure to do the right thing.” I could have had more assists or goals even today. After Elche defeated the team, the 28-year-old said to Spanish media that “sometimes the decision to shoot or pass was wrong”.

Hayen contends that Brugge can’t afford to give Barca the ball.

Nicky Hayen, a 45-year-old coach at Club Brugge, took over as interim manager in the 2023-2024 season. He has since won three titles, including the Belgian Super Cup in 2025 and the Belgian Cup last year.

Last year, Brugge also advanced to the Champions League’s last 16 after being aggregately defeated 6-1 by Aston Villa.

Hayen praised his team’s “ideas and intentions” following the weekend victory over Denders, but claimed that “the quality was not always top-notch.” The Belgian side will need to significantly improve their game in order to defeat Barcelona.

By scoring that third goal, we could have made things easier on ourselves. Additionally, he said, “We gave away some balls, which you should never try to avoid at all costs when you play Barcelona on Wednesday.”

Head-to-head

Only two times have Barca and Club Brugge faced off. Both of Barcelona’s matches, which were in the Champions League group stage, were won.

The last time the two teams met, Barcelona won 1-0 away in Bruges thanks to Juan Riquelme’s goal.

In the previous game at Camp Nou, Barca had won by a score of 3-2.

Team news from Club Brugge

Due to a groin injury, former Sunderland and ex-Liverpool keeper Simon Mignolet will miss out, and Ludovit Reis will also miss because of a shoulder issue.

Raphael Onyedika, a midfielder from Nigeria, came off the bench against Denders over the weekend after five weeks of unfitness.

The main attacking trio at Club Brugge, Christos Tzolis, Nicolo Tresoldi, and Carlos Forbs, may have some problems for Barca. Tzolis, a young Greek international winger, has eight goals and eight assists this season, while Tresoldi, a young Greek international, has six goals and three assists to his name.

Before facing Barca, Tresoldi stated that he was anticipating facing one of his heroes.

One of my idols is [Veteran striker Robert] Lewandowski. He stated, “I’m looking forward to playing against him.”

news from the Barcelona team

Important midfielder Pedri is expected to be unavailable until after the November international break due to a muscular issue, while winger Raphinha is still out with a hamstring issue.

Although injury-prone Marc-Andre ter Stegen and Joan Garcia are also sidelined, Barca are fortunate to have the reliable Wojciech Szczesny between the sticks.

Due to a calf issue, center back Andreas Christensen will likely miss Wednesday night and not play for the past two games.

As they recover from injuries and are likely to start as substitutes against Brugge, Lewandowski and playmaker Dani Olmo started some minutes off the bench against Elche.

Starting lineup for Club Brugge was anticipated

Jackers, Sabbe, Ordonez, Meijer, Stankovic, Forbs, Audoor, Vanaken, Tzolis, Tresoldi, and others.

Barcelona’s starting lineup is anticipated

Unlike most politicians, Dick Cheney didn’t care if he was liked.

“If you want to be loved, then go be a movie star,” he said in the 2013 documentary, I am Dick Cheney.

That view didn’t stop him from becoming the most powerful vice president in the history of the United States. And it afforded Cheney the thick skin he needed to weather sharp criticism of his tactics during the so-called “war on terror” following the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington.

Cheney died on Monday, aged 84, due to complications of pneumonia and cardiac and vascular disease, according to a statement issued by his family. He had suffered heart-related problems for much of his adult life.

“Dick Cheney was a great and good man who taught his children and grandchildren to love our country, and to live lives of courage, honor, love, kindness, and fly fishing,” the family said in its statement.

But to millions around the world, he was also a deeply divisive figure, his legacy tainted by bloodshed and chaos following the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, lies about Baghdad’s non-existent weapons of mass destruction (WMDs), domestic cyber-snooping and the torture of Guantanamo Bay inmates.

Contemporaries saw him as the power behind the throne of President George W Bush, using his political clout and acumen to dominate his boss and hatch the “war on terror” and other neoconservative plans.

“Cheney has to be counted among the most influential Americans of the last 40 years. He was the consummate bureaucratic operator,” Jake Bernstein, co-author of Vice: Dick Cheney and the Hijacking of the American Presidency, told Al Jazeera.

“He engineered his own selection as vice president and used what was often a ceremonial post to transform US policy. His legacy continues: the surveillance society, the reputational stain of state-sponsored torture, the failure to deal with climate change and the bloat of private military contractors are just a few areas in which his imprint lingers.”

Cheney was born in Nebraska and grew up in Casper, a calm and pleasant oil city in Wyoming, with his hard-working, Democrat-voting parents: Marjorie and Richard Herbert Cheney, a soil management expert.

He abandoned a scholarship at Yale University and fell into a losing streak of blue-collar jobs and drunk-driving tickets, but re-booted his career as a political science scholar and joined the tumult of Washington politics.

He became fellow neoconservative Donald Rumsfeld’s protege. They forged a duo that led Republican administrations for decades — Rumsfeld was Bush’s defense secretary. Observers noted how the two men finished each other’s sentences and dubbed them the Praetorian Guard for their Roman-like disciplined efficacy.

By 1975, Cheney was chief of staff of the Gerald Ford White House, the youngest person to hold the post. Later, as a House Representative for Wyoming, Cheney was a traditionalist voice on abortion, gun control and the environment.

“The smart young congressman, Dick Cheney, was a hit in Washington: a model of the practical, get-things-done conservative and a leader, right out of the box,” Leslie Gelb, former president of the Council on Foreign Relations, a think tank, told Al Jazeera in 2015.

“Over time, he grew convinced that the country needed a hardliner, and he had the credentials to take that posture,” said Gelb, who died in 2019.

Cheney bucked the trend of old-fashioned Republicanism in one key aspect. Mary, the younger of two daughters with his high-school sweetheart and wife, Lynne, is a lesbian. The Cheneys were opposed to banning same-sex marriage.

As secretary of defense under President George HW Bush (1989-93), Cheney scaled back military spending as the Soviet Union fell apart and ran successful campaigns in Panama and against Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein’s forces in Kuwait.

“Back then, he was disciplined, conservative and careful; using additional military strength and limiting a war’s goals so as to accomplish its objectives. He knew that starting a war meant that you also needed to win it,” Michael O’Hanlon, a defence expert at the Brookings Institution, told Al Jazeera.

But that attitude appeared to have changed over the following decade, by the time the US was processing its response to 9/11.

“As vice president, he favoured less careful preparation for the post-Saddam, post-Taliban environments in Iraq and Afghanistan. He used twice as many people to evict Saddam from Kuwait as the George W Bush administration did to overthrow Iraq’s government and then try to stabilise the country afterwards,” O’Hanlon said.

In 1995, with Democrats in the White House, Cheney became CEO of Halliburton. The US oil and engineering firm has been embroiled in controversy over environmental damage and its growing list of US military contracts.

“As CEO of Halliburton, Cheney was a key figure in the early history of the ‘privatised military industry’ that nowadays encompasses hundreds of firms, thousands of employees and billions of dollars in revenue,” Peter Singer, author of Corporate Warriors, told Al Jazeera.

“The privatisation of warfare has allowed startling new capabilities and efficiencies in how war is carried out, but the introduction of the profit motive onto the battlefield raises troubling questions for democracy, ethics, management, human rights and national security.”

September  11, 2001, attacks

Back in the White House in 2001, Cheney brought in his trusted partner, Rumsfeld, as defense secretary, and brought allies in to other tiers of administration.

On September 11 of that year, Cheney was in the White House, deciding whether to shoot down the last airborne hijacked passenger jet, when Bush was reading The Pet Goat with schoolchildren in Florida.

As the US launched regime-toppling attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq, Cheney was implicated in the planning of the wars that ignored facts and — in the case of the conflict in Iraq — the United Nations charter. As the wars dragged on, killing tens of thousands of people, devastating the attacked countries and draining US resources, the criticism mounted. By 2008, when Barack Obama swept to power, the nation’s mood had turned decisively against the wars.

Cheney’s justification for the invasion of Iraq in 2003 – Saddam Hussein’s secret WMDs – turned out to be bogus. Dismantling Iraq’s army and Baath party left the nation ungoverned and prone to the destabilising tactics of al-Qaeda and the ISIL (ISIS) armed groups.

“He was a misfit with his hawkish use of conventional military force in the 21st century, when the enemy was less frequently a traditional nation state, which responds to threats of force, but sub-groups that were not intimidated by US military might,” added Gelb in 2015.

Cheney loved hunting — in 2006, he accidentally shot a Texas lawyer and friend, Harry Whittington, with a hunting shotgun while they were shooting quail. Whittington survived after major operations.

As vice president, Cheney also helped design a 9/11 response that saw increased government cyber-snooping on US citizens and the harsh interrogations of “terrorism suspects” at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and a global web of so-called “black sites”.

Even after a Congressional study found that using such “enhanced interrogation” techniques as waterboarding, hooding and sleep deprivation were brutal and ineffective in 2014, Cheney defended his choices.