Three goals, a clean sheet, and a number that tells its own story: 162. That is how many times Denis Odoi touched the ball for FCV Dender during their 3-0 win over Club NXT U23, more than anyone else on the pitch, and he barely wasted a single one of those touches.
Odoi completed 155 of 162 passes, a 96 percent success rate that underlined just how often the ball ran through him. For a defender, that kind of volume usually means one thing: the team was building patiently, and he was the outlet everyone trusted.
Control From the Back
Dender did not need to force anything. With Odoi dictating tempo from deep, the home side picked their moments and finished with three unanswered goals. His rating of 8.0 reflected a performance built less on flashy moments and more on relentless reliability, the sort of showing that rarely makes headlines but quietly shapes a scoreline.
Club NXT U23, for all their effort, never found a way to disrupt that rhythm. When a team's most experienced defender is also its busiest passer, matches tend to go exactly the way this one did.
The Numbers Behind the Win
- Final score: FCV Dender 3-0 Club NXT U23
- Denis Odoi: 155/162 passes completed (96%)
- Touches: 166
- Match rating: 8.0
It was not a game decided by a moment of individual brilliance, but by control sustained over ninety minutes. Odoi's fingerprints were on nearly every spell of possession Dender enjoyed, and the final scoreline suggests that kind of steady hand is exactly what carried them through.