AL KHOR, Qatar (AP) — Soccer powerhouses Belgium and Germany made early exits at the World Cup on Thursday, which many considered a wild day in group play.

Back-to-back early exits at the World Cup have Germany coach Hansi Flick wanting to go back to basics.

The four-time champions were again eliminated from the group stage four years after their embarrassing display as defending champions in Russia.

Something has to change, Flick said after a 4-2 victory over Costa Rica on Thursday that still wasn’t enough to secure a spot in the round of 16.

“I believe for the future of German football we need to do things differently in training,” said Flick, who took over as coach after last year’s European Championship. “For years we are talking about new goalkeepers and wingbacks, but Germany was always able to defend well. We need the basics.

“For the future, for the next 10 years, it is very important to focus on the new generation of players.”

It was only eight years ago that Germany won its fourth World Cup title, beating an Argentina team led by Lionel Messi in his prime in the final at the Maracana Stadium. With that victory, Germany became the only European team to win a World Cup in either North or South America.

In Qatar, it was an opening loss to Japan that set the stage for the disappointing finish this time. Germany was beaten 2-1 in that match last week, and followed it with a 1-1 draw against Spain.

That gave the Germans a chance in its last match at Al Bayt Stadium, and for a few minutes during the simultaneous final group matches on Thursday, it was enough. At halftime, for example, Germany was beating Costa Rica and Japan was losing to Spain — results that would have put the Germans into the round of 16.

It was Japan’s 2-1 victory over the Spaniards that essentially cost the Germans a chance to play at least one more match in Qatar.

Flick cited Spain as an example for his country to follow.

“Spain is very good in defense,” he said, even though the 2010 World Cup champions ultimately lost to Japan at the Khalifa International Stadium in Doha. “It focuses on training young players. They know the tactics well.”

It all started so well for Germany on Thursday with Serge Gnabry scoring a 10th-minute header and Spain taking an early lead against Japan.

Both matches were turned upside down in the second half.

Yeltsin Tejeda evened the score in the 58th minute and Juan Vargas scrambled another in the 70th, putting Costa Rica ahead 2-1 and all of a sudden on target to advance.

“There were a lot of individual mistakes and these are things that make me very angry,” Flick said.

But Germany substitute Kai Havertz made it 2-2 in the 73rd minute and then restored Germany’s lead in the 85th. Another substitute, Niclas Füllkrug, added the fourth.

Costa Rica had lost its opening game against Spain 7-0. The team then put on a much better display and beat Japan 1-0.

“We are not what we saw in our first game,” Costa Rica coach Luis Fernando Suarez said. “We had to go back to what made us qualify for the World Cup.”

Spain will take on Morocco, who took the top spot in Group F after defeating Canada 2-1, ESPN reported.

Belgium, ranked No. 2 in the world and finished third at the World Cup four years ago, was also eliminated from the world's biggest sporting event after a goalless tie against Croatia, who will play Japan in the round of 16, The Washington Post reported.

HISTORY MADE

The match was also notable because French referee Stéphanie Frappart became the first woman to officiate a men’s World Cup match.

RECORD SET

Manuel Neuer played in his 19th World Cup match to set a record for a goalkeeper — overtaking German great Sepp Maier and Brazil keeper Cláudio Taffarel.

GINTER’S WAIT

Matthias Ginter was participating in his third World Cup, but going into the match against Costa Rica he had yet to play a single minute at any of those tournaments. That all changed when he came on as a substitute in the 89th minute.

Related video above: Netherlands see off the US 3-1 to book their spot in the quarter-finals

Morocco became the first Arab nation to advance to the World Cup quarterfinals, beating Spain 3-0 in a penalty shootout on Tuesday.

Pablo Sarabia, Carlos Soler and Sergio Busquets missed their penalties for Spain, with Sarabia hitting the post and Morocco goalkeeper Yassine Bounou stopping the other two.

The teams drew 0-0 in regulation and extra time.

Morocco has been the biggest surprise of the tournament and will next face either Portugal or Switzerland.

Morocco is also the only team from outside Europe or South America to make it to the last eight. The team made the round of 16 once before, at the 1986 World Cup in Mexico.

Spain was eliminated by host Russia in a penalty shootout at the 2018 World Cup, and by Italy in the semifinals of last year's European Championship.

It was the fifth straight time Spain played extra time in a knockout round of a major tournament. The team played 120 minutes against Russia and in all three of its knockout games at Euro 2020.

Moroccan fans significantly outnumbered — and were louder — than the Spaniards at Education City Stadium.

Morocco and Spain are close neighbors with a complex geopolitical relationship.

Her hips don't lie and Shakira says she's not telling tall tales about being a victim of a boar attack.

According to the BBC, the singer said she was attacked by two wild boars as she and her eight-year-old son, Milan, walked in a park in Spain.

"They were taking my bag to the woods with my mobile phone in it," the Columbian singer said on her Instagram Stories Wednesday as she held up the bag. "They've destroyed everything."

Lest she not be believed, Shakira asked her son to back her up.

"Milan tell the truth," she said as her son with professional soccer player Gerard Piqué walked away. "Say how your mummy stood up to the wild boar."

The BBC reported that Spanish police received almost 1200 calls regarding wild hogs in 2016.

TODOQUE, Canary Islands —

A volcano in Spain’s Canary Islands kept nerves on edge Friday for a fifth day since it erupted, producing loud explosions, a huge ash cloud and cracking open a new fissure that spewed out more fiery molten rock.

The archipelago’s emergency services ordered the evacuation of scores of people from three villages on the island of La Palma and ordered residents to stay indoors in another. Already this week, almost 7,000 people have had to leave their homes. The prompt evacuations are credited with helping avoid casualties.

Loud bangs from the volcano’s mouth sent shock waves echoing across the hillsides. Explosions hurled molten rock and ash over a wide expanse. As a precaution, emergency services pulled back from the area.

Regional airline Binter temporarily halted flights due to a huge ash cloud that rose almost 4 miles into the sky.

More encouragingly, Spain's National Geographic Institute said it hadn’t recorded any earthquakes in the area for 24 hours, after registering 1,130 over the past week amid intense seismic activity before and after the eruption on the Cumbre Vieja volcanic ridge.

Also, the advance of the main river of lava slithering toward the sea slowed to about 3 feet per hour.

Both of the main lava flows are at least 33 feet high at their leading edges and have been destroying houses, farmland and infrastructure in their path since Sunday.

The lava has destroyed almost 400 buildings on La Palma, including many homes, on the western side of the island of 85,000 people, a European Union monitoring program said.

It said the lava stretches over almost 20,000 square feet and has blocked 9 miles of roads. Islanders make a living mostly from farming and tourism, and some may lose their livelihoods.

On a visit to La Palma, Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez announced a package of measures to help get the island back on its feet and "rebuild lives."

The Spanish government will provide aid for rebuilding homes and public infrastructure, such as roads, irrigation networks and schools, as well as relaunching the island’s tourism industry, Sánchez said. He did not say how much money would be made available but said a Cabinet meeting next week would provide more details.

Scientists say the lava flows could last for weeks or months.

Watch the video above to see the stunning images of the eruption.

The Cumbre Vieja volcano on Spain's La Palma island is continuing to expel molten lava and ash after erupting on Sunday and is likely to do so for days, the president of the Canary Islands regional government warned Monday.

Angel Victor Torres added in a post on Twitter that there had been no reports of injuries or deaths so far.

The Canary Islands emergency services tweeted late Sunday that 5,000 people had been evacuated from the area nearest to the eruption.

That figure included 400 tourists evacuated from a hotel on La Palma and taken to a hotel on the nearby island of Tenerife, Torres told Spanish radio station SER in an interview.

After a night of spectacular images of the lava illuminating the island's countryside, Torres told SER that experts believe there is still just one point of eruption from the volcano, near a "lightly populated" part of the island, which has a population of about 80,000 people.

Footage from the island showed at least one highway cut by a wall of lava; local officials said some houses had been damaged.

Officials have warned local residents to keep their distance from the eruption.

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen expressed solidarity with the people of La Palma in a Twitter post on Monday. She added that "we are in contact with Spanish authorities to offer any additional aid that is needed."

Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez has remained on La Palma, one of the smaller islands in the Canary Islands archipelago off the Atlantic coast of Morocco, after rushing there on Sunday.

Following the delay of his trip to New York for the United Nations General Assembly, Sanchez and other officials on Monday toured an evacuation center. He was later able to get a closer look at the volcano and its destruction.

The Canary Islands Volcanology Institute (Involcan) wrote in a statement on Facebook on Sunday that more than 25,000 earthquakes had been detected in the previous nine days around the Cumbre Vieja volcano.

Spanish news reports said the last major eruption from the volcano was 50 years ago.

The regional president said some 400 firefighting personnel were in place to battle any fires caused by the lava flows.

Spain's Ministry of Transport tweeted that it had prohibited ships from sailing too close to the volcano because of the risks posed by lava flowing into the sea.

The Canary Islands are a popular tourist destination for British, German and other European visitors.

SAN DIEGO (KGTV) -- A cancer drug based on a compound found in a rare sea creature is 30 to 100 times more powerful against the virus that causes COVID-19 than remdesivir, according to a new set of experiments reported in Science.

In lab tests in petri dishes and mice, the drug Aplidin showed the ability to significantly slow replication of the virus and reduce lung inflammation, according to a team led by scientists at the University of California San Francisco.

Aplidin is the brand name of the drug plitidepsin, a compound originally found in a rare Mediterranean sea squirt. Sea squirts cling to rocks and coral. The creatures are named for their tendency to squirt out seawater when disturbed.

The Australian Regulatory Agency approved Aplidin in 2018 for the treatment of multiple myeloma. The drug does not have authorization from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

“Of all the drugs that we and our collaborators have screened [for efficacy against COVID-19], this is by far the most potent,” said Dr. Nevan Krogan, the director of UCSF’s Quantitative Biosciences Institute.

Dr. Krogan and his colleagues have been testing existing drugs to see if they can be repurposed to be used to treat the coronavirus. Instead of focusing on drugs like remdesivir that target proteins in the virus itself, they have been reviewing a catalog of therapies that target proteins in human cells that the virus needs to hijack in order to replicate.

“The virus can’t live by itself. It can’t replicate by itself. It needs our genes and our proteins,” Dr. Krogan said.

With viral mutations making headlines around the world, there are some concerns that adaptations in the coronavirus’ spike protein might allow the virus to eventually evade therapies like monoclonal antibodies or the vaccines. That’s where this alternate strategy of targeting human proteins has a major advantage, Krogan said.

“If you target the human protein, we don't mutate nearly as fast as a virus so you don't have to worry about it getting resistance that way,” he said.

This week, Krogan and his collaborators released early research showing Aplidin was just as effective against the UK variant as it was against the original strain. The research was posted to a pre-print server, meaning it has not yet been peer-reviewed.

“What we've also shown is that different viruses target similar human proteins, so if you're going to be able to combat SARS-CoV-2, you're probably going to [combat] SARS-CoV-3,” he said.

PharmaMar, the Spanish drugmaker behind Aplidin, has completed Phase 1 and Phase 2 trials of Aplidin for use in COVID-19 patients with positive results, setting up a large-scale Phase 3 trial, Krogan said, although the start date is unclear.

“If Phase 3 clinical trials started tomorrow, one could see this drug being more widely used in a couple of months” if the results were promising, he said.

The drug is given in lower doses to COVID-19 patients and for a shorter period than the regimen for cancer patients, reducing the potential for side effects.

Krogan said it’s the closest any drug he’s tested has gotten to becoming a real COVID-19 treatment; a treatment straight from the Mediterranean Sea.

This story originally reported by Derek Staahl on 10News.com.