The French Connection : France

French annus horribilis ends with echoes of past and promise for future

James Horncastle — Thu, 18 Nov 2010 10:42:00 GMT

L’Équipe billed it as the 100 years squabble, a century of fierce sporting rivalry seasoned inevitably with the history that links England and France so intrinsically as noisy neighbours.

“Never forget Agincourt,” read one editorial, while another predictably mentioned Waterloo, both famous French defeats. And yet the psychology, something Laurent Blanc values so much, was clear for all to see. The country’s pride was still stinging.

“To interest a Frenchman in a boxing match, you must tell him that his national honour is at stake,” wrote André Maurois. “To interest an Englishman in a war, you must suggest to him that it resembles a boxing match.”

A friendly this clearly wasn’t, even if Frank Leboeuf said “When you hear God Save the Queen you feel English.” The undeniable French influence at Arsenal and Chelsea was cited as evidence of a footballing Entente Cordiale. But in all honesty it has been more of a rapprochement.

David Ginola recalled the amateurism at Newcastle United in the 1990s. “Some bus trips home lasted five or six hours,” he smiled. “We often stopped en route to eat fish and chips wrapped in newspaper.” Emmanuel Petit admitted that he knew he’d landed in England when Carlton Palmer tried to “cut off” his leg in a match against Southampton, breaking his shin guards.

The gloves officially came off, at least among the French media, when Fabio Capello’s press conference on Tuesday focused primarily on the Royal engagement and England’s 2018 World Cup bid. “The indifference of the British journalists towards the French team” was duly noted, as was the fact no translator was provided.

“The breakfast available to journalists gave some idea of the sense of British hospitality,” scoffed an article on L’Équipe’s website, which no doubt reinforces French stereotypes as much as English ones.

Blanc was doing his best to be diplomatic, though. “It’s still the England team,” he said. “They are better than us in the FIFA world rankings. I think that this team is part of the top 10 European teams. It’s not the case with us.” Even so, the French weren’t going to roll over. “There is not the same pressure for a result than in an official match,” he added. “I hope that it’s a good match. It’s prestigious. Interesting to play in of course. Interesting to win.”

Blanc was under no illusion as to the moment this encounter afforded him. The 44-year-old only played once against England – at Wembley on February 10 1999, when France incredibly still had to prove that they were worthy of their World Cup win.

Roger Lemerre had just taken over from Aime Jacquet and was remembered for being one of the ‘choirboys’ who had suffered a chastening 5-0 defeat to England 30 years earlier. France had never previously done better than a 2-2 draw at Wembley in 1951, but this time it would be different.

Didier Deschamps called it the “perfect match”. He also later described Nicolas Anelka as “our Ronaldo” and with good reason. The 19-year-old scored a stunning brace of goals, his first coming off a wonderful assist from Zinedine Zidane.

The then Arsenal striker could have bagged a third too if the woodwork hadn’t denied him in a way it didn’t Geoff Hurst in 1966. France won emphatically 2-0. The performance was exalted as the best of that era, and Blanc would have been mindful of it in the build-up, perhaps in the hope that Karim Benzema would have a night like Anelka.

The Real Madrid striker has already prompted Blanc to adapt his philosophy. On August 26, he said: “A player cannot hope to play for France if they don’t play regularly for their club.” The coach of Les Bleus reiterated his stance after Benzema twice opened the scoring in 2-0 victories over Bosnia and then Luxembourg in September and October. “He must play at Real. I have told Karim that he must be on top to impose himself. He must put all his cards to one side to seize his chance. There will be one.”

And yet though increasingly decisive from the Madrid bench, Benzema is still not a starter, and Blanc has had to soften his position. “Find me another international centre-forward who plays at a big club and scores goals,” he challenged reporters on Tuesday. “Benzema is our best centre-forward. I can talk to him about how he can become better, but I can’t intervene in his career choices.”

Such a situation is not uncommon in French football history. “I was faced with the same question with Eric Cantona when he didn’t play at Marseille and I made him play for France,” Michel Platini explained. “But I thought he was the best. So if Blanc thinks that Benzema is the best then he should make him play.”

On last night’s showing, one would find it hard to argue with that assessment. Benzema may have tried Blanc’s patience last month, turning up late for training camp, which subsequently resulted in a fine and a punishment that consisted of singing a song in front of his teammates, but the 23-year-old underlined his natural ability at Wembley.

Benzema lasted just 67 minutes, but his interplay fizzed amid the kinetic energy of France’s other attacking players, whose movement and one-touch football was indicative of their greater technical quality than England’s players.

Vitally for a striker, he took his chance when it arrived and once again opened the scoring for France. Benzema’s pinpoint finish in the 16th minute belied no sign of rustiness. All things considered, he looked well-oiled – like the team as a whole.

High 10: Scorers Benzema and Valbuena

Wearing Adidas for the last time before a kit deal with Nike comes into effect, ending a much-storied relationship that stretches back to 1972, France shed their skin. For a time it looked as though the abiding image of Les Bleus this year would be drab football and Raymond Domenech stood on a hill in Knysna like a sad puppet, reading out a statement written by his players who were striking in protest at the treatment of Nicolas Anelka.

Instead, it ended on a high note. France are playing with a joie de vivre again. Samir Nasri hinted as much about the new mood in the camp on Saturday when he told L’Équipe: “There is a real team spirit and a lot more contact with the staff. Jean-Louis Gasset, the assistant coach, talks a lot. He jokes. It’s good.

"All the coaches know their job. It simply wasn’t like that before. Today, even when we play PlayStation, the coach comes to see us play to take the mickey out of us. He watches our matches and says: ‘If only you could do that on the pitch...’.”

To Blanc, building a new spirit within the group was his No.1 priority, and it appears to be developing well – although it remains to be seen what effect the reintegration of the strike’s ringleaders has on the squad (as alluded to by Bixente Lizarazu when Eric Abidal was called up) and, lest we forget, the recent dispute over bonuses.

As for the team’s style of play, last night saw the return of the one-two and was of course the first time Yoann Gourcuff and Samir Nasri have started together. It wasn’t quite the carré magique of Platini and Alain Giresse, but did at least show that Blanc wants to play good football like he did at Bordeaux and feels confident enough to dare a little after the racking up a string of wins.

While he has expressed his admiration for Barcelona, the model remains that of Germany. Interviewed in yesterday’s La Gazzetta dello Sport, Blanc said: “In 10 years, they archived the physical play for the fluid kind as seen at the World Cup.”

But it’s still early days. Blanc’s reaction to last night’s 2-1 victory was “above all optimistic, but not euphoric,” and that is the right tone to set. Yet the turnaround is welcome. Le Figaro’s headline summed up the mood on L’Hexagone this morning: “Les Bleus’ annus horribilis ends with the pledge of a happy future.” Indeed it does.

Blanc goes FBI in search for leader

James Horncastle — Mon, 11 Oct 2010 10:05:00 GMT

October 11, 1995 is a date that resonates in French football’s collective consciousness.

After all, it promised to be a particularly dark and unforgiving night for the beleaguered national team. Both hammer and nail were poised at the ready to seal the coffin on Aimé Jacquet’s time in charge of Les Bleus. The funereal setting was the Ghencea stadium in Bucharest where France needed to beat Romania to keep their hopes of qualifying for Euro 96 alive.

Les Bleus had not been to any major international competition for five years. It was a nadir that was barely comprehensible just over a decade after Michel Platini and the carré magique had inspired France to victory at the European Championship. But once again La Marseillaise was being whistled and it looked as though France were in for a gut-wrenching spell in the international wilderness much as they had been between 1966 and 1978.

Les Bleus had drawn the home leg 0-0, and expectation was so low as to be resolutely pessimistic. But goals from Christian Karembeu, Youri Djorkaeff and Zinedine Zidane capped a fantastic performance as Jacquet’s young and inexperienced side - six of whom didn’t even have 10 caps - recorded a 3-1 victory that would turn things around for France in a way no one thought possible.

“It’s the match that changed everything,” Didier Deschamps later told France Football. “The team and Aimé had been criticised a lot, and, if we didn’t win down there in Romania, we could have kissed goodbye to the Euros. And if we didn’t go to the Euros, we would have changed coach without a doubt, the group would have exploded and we would’ve had to rebuild all over again, like after the failure in 1993. In other words, even though we’ll never know, there probably wouldn’t have been a 1998 or a 2000.”

Jacquet was feeling the pressure back in 1995

Laurent Blanc no doubt cast his mind back to that result in the days preceding Romania’s visit to the Stade de France for their Euro 2012 qualifier on Saturday night. The nation’s hopes of making the finals in Poland and Ukraine weren’t yet in jeopardy – the dumbfounded head-scratching that followed an unlucky opening day defeat to Belarus did after all presage a 2-0 victory worthy of a pat on the back over Bosnia in Sarajevo.

But such was the post-traumatic stress that engulfed Les Bleus this summer, the mood surrounding the camp was still fragile. This prompted Blanc to acknowledge a Mourinho-ism: “Who knows only football, knows nothing about football.”

Consequently, the former Bordeaux coach’s first two months in charge of France has been spent mostly working on the intangibles like mentality, team-building and leadership rather than focusing explicitly on tactics. “It was Michael Jordan who said talent is enough to win a match, but team spirit is necessary to win trophies,” Blanc opined.

So when Karim Benzema, Abou Diaby and Lassana Diarra all turned up late for training last week, he saw another opportunity to develop team spirit. Blanc fined the trio €1000 each, but also made them sing a song in front of the rest of the squad in a punishment that served as a bonding exercise.

Joking aside, the creation of a group and the identification of a leader has become a priority for Le President. Until Saturday’s game, Blanc had experimented with three different captains – Roma’s Philippe Mexès, Chelsea’s Florent Malouda and Bordeaux’s Alou Diarra. The search stepped up last week when he invited an as yet unnamed ‘profiler’ to Clairefontaine to assess his players, each of whom were given a multiple choice test consisting of no fewer than 50 questions.

L’Équipe, for one, was sceptical with one outraged editorial even asking why a ‘profiler’ had been brought in considering that the role calls to mind FBI agents looking for nefarious serial killers with a penchant for taking body parts as trophies and storing them in refrigerators. However, not all were critical of Blanc’s so-called Eileen Drewery moment. “Laurent has understood that the human exists in football,” wrote Vikash Dhorasoo in his blog.

When quizzed about it himself, Blanc said: “Don’t think we went into a dark room with someone and lay down on a yellow couch. The players got involved without having any second thoughts and I did the same work on myself 15 days ago.” Yet the pop psychology didn’t stop there.

Blanc's discovery of humans in football was a revelation...

Having not won in Paris for nearly a year, Blanc was unequivocal. “The Stade de France must become the Stade des Joueurs,” he claimed. The solution was relatively straightforward: two training sessions were scheduled there – one on the eve of the match and one the day after- in an effort to get a young team used to the site of France’s greatest ever victory, a constant reminder for some of just how far Les Bleus have fallen.

After getting the players’ minds right, Blanc now had a slight selection headache. In defence, Mexès and Lille’s trained mechanic Adil Rami have become his first choice centre-back pairing, while up front, Benzema is still the favourite to lead the line, partly by virtue of the fact that aside from Jean Nicolas, a striker from the 1930s, he has scored a record number of goals for France for a 22-year-old.

Despite Benzema’s tardiness and his unashamed ignorance of Romania - as was amply demonstrated when he named Adrian Mutu as a threat to France even though the Fiorentina striker has been serving a ban for doping since the spring – his performance against Bosnia last month reminded everyone of his natural talent for finding the net.

The question mark hung over the midfield, where Blanc had Samir Nasri and Yoann Gourcuff available for selection for the first time since his appointment in July. Here was the solution to France’s problems in the final third; a pair of lock-pickers capable of playing together like Giresse and Platini or Djorkaeff and Zidane.

But the timing wasn’t right. Despite Blanc’s assertion that ‘a ball in the air is a ball lost’ - indicating his preference for a technical short-passing game - the accent at the moment falls on substance, not style and stopping the rot.

So when the teamsheet was read out, Gourcuff found himself on the bench whereas Nasri was in the starting line-up, this time in a 4-2-3-1 and not the 4-3-3 France had deployed in Sarajevo. Diarra was named as captain for the second time under Blanc, something Malouda could have cause for feeling aggrieved about being an undisputed regular for club and country, which Mexès certainly can’t say for himself at Roma and Diarra has arguably yet to become for France.

As the team strode out on the pitch, the atmosphere felt right. The players finally joined the crowd in belting out La Marseillaise having been told to learn the lyrics last month. And the initial signs were certainly positive. After a tetchy start, France began to dominate, keeping Romania pegged back in their own half, but creating little in the way of clear-cut chances. Clearly sensing a repeat of the ‘Belarus accident’, the fans grew restless and jeered France off the pitch at half-time.

Their fear nearly proved psychosomatic after the break, as George Florescu stretched Hugo Lloris into an acrobatic save, scaring France into life. Marseille winger Mathieu Valbuena would go close just before the hour mark, seeing the excellent Costel Pantelimon tip his shot on to the bar. Nasri would work him again a minute later, but Romania refused to be cowed hitting the post through Cristian Sapunaru after 71 minutes.

Whereas Raymond Domenech would frustratingly lean against his dugout with his arms folded in hapless resignation, Blanc seized the moment to impose his will on the game. He made a string of substitutions in the final 20 minutes, taking off Valbuena, Nasri and Benzema for Loïc Rémy, Gourcuff and Dimitri Payet respectively. The Three Musketeers would conspire to win the game for France.

The deadlock was broken in the 83rd minute when Diarra sent a long ball over the scrum-capped Cristian Chivu and challenged Rémy to beat the Romanian for pace, which he did. The 23-year-old Marseille striker, whose career looked in doubt only last month when a heart defect was picked up in a routine medical, opened his account with a cool finish, scoring his side’s first goal at the Stade de France since last November.

In essence, though, the strike was quite anti-Blanc in its conception as Diarra’s pass was not on the floor, but in the air where hypothetically it could be lost while Rémy had actually poo-pooed the need for a profiler earlier in the week. “Some players are more fragile than others,” he said. “For me, it’s not a necessity. I manage fine by myself.”

Nevertheless, the second and final goal was the product of a wonderfully worked piece of skill from Payet, who transferred his fine club form with Saint-Étienne to his country with effortless aplomb. The 23-year-old debutante was played in down the right-hand side in the 93rd minute, turned his marker inside out, twisting his blood so as to leave him on the floor.

Like all the great football alchemists, Payet created time and space for himself to pick a pass for Gourcuff who smashed the ball home practically from the penalty spot.

It capped a fine 2-0 win, and a convincing one too that was especially welcome after the diet of dour served up under Domenech. “It was a pleasure,” read L’Équipe’s front-page headline on Sunday. The paper’s follow up piece was equally smiley in its title: “Life is beautiful.”

Les Bleus are now top of Group D with a one-point lead over Belarus and Albania. Tuesday’s match against Luxembourg is an opportunity to extend that advantage. Even so, Blanc is keen not to get carried away, insisting that everyone’s feet remain on the ground and that they maintain their focus and perspective. After all, France are still walking away from the wreckage of a bus crash in Knysna and the road to recovery is a long one.

But just like 15 years ago today when a win over Romania laid a foundation and ‘changed everything’, there is a renewed sense of hope again that Saturday night’s victory will at least help Les Bleus turn a corner and put South Africa definitively behind them.

French future already looks brighter

Paul Simpson — Mon, 02 Aug 2010 10:19:00 GMT

“Here, perhaps, is the future of the Bleus”. That was the tentative headline with which Le Monde greeted the French Under-19 side’s progress to the European Championship final.

Still stunned by a World Cup campaign that set a gloriously dysfunctional standard by which all future ineptitude in the tournament will be judged, even Le Monde’s seasoned journalists dared not hope for too much.

But the Under-19s victory over Spain, coming at the end of a week in which new manager Laurent Blanc suspended all 23 mutineers in South Africa for his first game in charge, was a superb line in the sand exercise.

Le Foot magazine, with a taste for a play on colours that is quintessentially French, recently published a dossier noir (black) on the Raymond Domenech era and a dossier blanc on the bright new era which Domenech’s successor, a man known informally to his old Manchester United teammates as Larry White, is expected to usher in. Le Foot’s front cover photo made Domenech look like a silent movie villain sniggering into his sleeve at all the agony he has caused.

Outwardly France seems the same as ever. The queues outside the bakers are as long, the nation’s mysterious reverence for the questionable comic genius of Jerry Lewis shows no signs of waning and the papers are, once again, full of mysterious misdoings in high places in a scandal Le Monde invariably refers to as l’affaire Betencourt (a low grade, but usefully ambiguous affair in which nobody really agrees who gave what money to whom and for what purpose but everybody bar the man himself agrees it’s Nicolas Sarkozy’s fault).

But the catastrophe in South Africa has prompted much anguish, parliamentary interrogation (nonchalantly pursued despite threats from FIFA), a summit between Sarkozy and Thierry Henry, the threat of a £10 million lawsuit from kit sponsor Adidas and the resignation of Jean-Piere Escalettes, who has still not been replaced as president of the French FA.

Travelling through northwest France over the last fortnight I was struck by how few visual traces of the last World Cup remained. It was as if the tournament had been airbrushed from the streets.

Laurent is actually already starting to look a bit like Mad Ray...

I was startled when I finally saw a French boy drinking Coke from a can adorned with a cut out of Franck Ribery the player So Foot magazine identified as the player mainly responsible for “du fiasco bleu”. Not that the magazine let Domenech off, publishing a damning piece headlined “Requiem for a clown”.

The startling aspect of So Foot’s coverage, for English fans, is how many of its damning criticisms of Domenech apply to Fabio Capello’s management in South Africa. The Italian may not be paranoid or incompetent but like Domenech he could credibly be accused of poor communication, poor psychology, poor strategy and poor management in the 2010 World Cup, the tournament by which he had hoped to be judged.

And therein may lie hope for the future of French football. The World Cup made it melodramatically, emphatically clear that three major European football nations had some serious rebuilding to do: England, France and Italy.

Of the three, France have acted most decisively. Calcio’s problems may yet prove too big for new Azzurri coach Cesare Prandelli to solve single-handed, though he may improve matters, while English football seems, despite the right noises from the likes of Trevor Brooking, to be in denial and clutching at any straw – the loss of Wayne Rooney’s form being the latest excuse kindly offered by the ubiquitous Gerard Houllier – to face the awful truth.

France have had a real national debate, earmarked a new direction and a new philosophy under Blanc (who has, commendably, said he will quit of France don’t qualify for Euro 2012) and found some new heroes in Gael Kakuta and Gueida Fofana.

The Under-19 success, hailed as a national redemption, may prove a false dawn. (Some coaches privately fear that France is no longer producing the quality or quality of youngsters that enabled it to dominate football in the late 1990s).

But this small victory has softened the blow of South Africa and makes it harder for the National Front to turn the World Cup catastrophe into a barely coded political message about the alleged dangers of a polyglot society.

For French football, the future already looks a bit brighter than it did at the end of June when a French philosopher called Alain Finkielkraut – no I’m not making this up – likened Les Bleus to “a gang of hooligans with the morals of the mafia”.

In South Africa, captain Patrice Evra unwisely suggested that France had become a “small football nation”. Last week, with Blanc’s courageous stand and the Under-19’s triumph, French football just got a bit bigger.

More from Paul Simpson

FourFourTwo.com: More to read...

FFT.com: Blogs * News * Interviews * Home
Join us: Twitter * Facebook * Forums