The French Connection : Marseille, Bordeaux, Auxerre

PSG turn 40, Giuly strips and the hate turns to love

James Horncastle — Wed, 17 Nov 2010 11:37:00 GMT

Before all greetings cards became a 1950s setting of domestic bliss juxtaposed with a lewd speech bubble, the greetings written inside were sweet and innocent, wishing you all the best with unbridled optimism. One nauseatingly hopeful message became a cliche in its own right: ‘Life begins at 40’.

So when Paris Saint-Germain hit the Big Four-Oh this year, even France Football felt compelled to ask: "Can it be the start of a different story?" Of course, such an open and ambiguous question is a catch-all loaded with meaning, as it not only hints at a new dawn and today being the first day of the rest of your life, but also that a page needs turning and that it’s time the past was put to one side.

Mid-life crisis doesn’t even begin to describe the situation at PSG in the last few years. "It’s a club where things have happened in 40 years that don’t happen to others in 400," wrote L’Equipe. Indeed, celebrations marking the anniversary of PSG’s inception on August 27, 1970 had at their centre the ambition of becoming a national power again – an ambition, pundits mockingly add, that the club appears to have every summer.

It’s certainly no exaggeration to suggest that last season was a rollercoaster both on and off the pitch. PSG were second after four games, only to finish in 13th place. Sebastien Bazin, the club’s majority shareholder, was so angry that he stormed into the dressing room after a 2-2 draw against Valenciennes in May and raged: "I don’t think you understand the financial consequences of our final position in the championship."

HITTING ROCK BOTTOM

PSG didn’t win any of their last six games of the campaign, their slide down the table costing an estimated €3m in prize money. So it’s really little wonder that Bazin was still doing the rounds as recently as this week, calling for players’ wages to be reduced and more emphasis to be put on performance related bonuses.

To borrow a headline from L’Equipe, PSG did at least manage to save their season with another victory in the French Cup, their third triumph this decade also booking a place in Europe. But even that achievement had to be taken with a pinch of salt as they met just two Ligue 1 teams in six rounds, beating such domestic minnows as Aubervilliers, Evian, Vesoul and Quevilly en route to the final.

Speaking in July, PSG’s coach Antoine Kombouare – a living relic of the club’s 1990s glory days when his ‘golden helmet’ helped complete one of the greatest comebacks in the history of European club football – was under no illusion as to the scale of the task ahead of him. "I’ve had pressure since the very start," he said. "But I know that having the same season this year is not allowed."

It was an aberration off the pitch, too. Nike and PSG were on trial for allegedly hiding payments between 1998 and 2005 to attract top players like Nicolas Anelka and Gabriel Heinze to the Parc des Princes. But the nadir came in February when a second PSG supporter in three and a half years was killed, this time before the Clasico against Marseille in violent fratricidal clashes between the Boulogne Kop with its racist element and the Auteuil stand with its ethnic minorities.

"Once again it’s the club’s image which suffers," the goalkeeper Gregory Coupet said. "At a sporting level, we feel strongly responsible because if there had been good results there maybe wouldn’t have been all these problems and this rise in violence. It’s also a reflection on society. People fear police less and less and that creates riots."

So PSG’s 40th year was also Year Zero – time to go and take a good hard look in the mirror and reassess everything. Club president Robin Leproux implemented a courageous plan called ‘Everyone PSG’ whereby 13,000 season tickets in the Boulogne and Auteuil ends were prevented from being renewed to root out the hooligans and pacify the Parc, while families were welcomed to sit in the lower tier behind the goal with an attractive ticketing operation.

"If we don’t take these measures," he said. "The club’s future is in danger." But as Coupet had said, the team itself had a role to play – winning games would help alleviate the tension. Marseille midfielder Edouard Cisse, whose decade at PSG was punctuated with loan spells at Rennes, West Ham and Monaco, indicated as much only last month, joking that: "When things go bad in Paris, they go really bad. But when things go well, they go really well."

BRINGING IT ALL BACK HOME

Mindful that PSG’s very credibility was at stake after just two top-five finishes in 10 years - the most recent coming in 2004 - and that sponsors or potential investors were also beginning to shy away from the club, its much-maligned owners Colony Capital were wary of investing any more money in the playing staff. The purse strings were prised open just enough to sign three players at a cost of £7.9m.

The most important was Nene - the lithe playmaker brought in from Monaco - whose ability to play on the left-hand side resolved a problem PSG have been wrestling with since they fell out with Jerome Rothen. The Brazilian’s arrival brought balance to the side, as it allowed Kombouare to move Stephane Sessegnon back to his preferred position on the right.

Sessegnon, Sakho & Nene find the formula

It sounds simple, but PSG were no longer putting square pegs in round holes, as they now had four specialists in four offensive positions – a lefty, a righty and a big-man/little-man partnership up front in Guillaume Hoarau and Mevlut Erdinc.

But Nene was immediately cast as the difference-maker, the heir to PSG’s other great Brazilians like Valdo, Leonardo and of course Rai, the protagonist of their last league title in 1994 and the club’s back-to-back appearances in the Cup Winners’ Cup final. Nene scored 14 goals last season, and laid on four assists.

Yet his ability from set-pieces perhaps showed that PSG were following the path to success trodden by Bordeaux and Marseille who based their recent title triumphs on being dangerous from corners and free-kicks via Yoann Gourcuff and Lucho Gonzalez.

"Nene gets us out of bad situations," said fellow summer signing Mathieu Bodmer. "He always scores a lot of goals, but he also draws many fouls and gets a number of free-kicks. Two defenders concentrate on him, which leaves more space for the others."

The initial indications were good too, as PSG beat Marseille on penalties to win the French equivalent of the Charity Shield in Tunisia and then opened their league campaign with a 3-1 win against Saint-Etienne in front of just 22,689 spectators, the lowest crowd for that fixture at the Parc des Princes for 10 years, a clear by-product of the new security measures. The atmosphere may have suffered, but the intentions were good and the results improving.

After starting the season with a three-match unbeaten run, true to form PSG lost three on the bounce. History was repeating itself. "We have to find out how PSG will cope with the crisis periods," Auxerre coach Jean Fernandez opined. Kombouare then did something inspired. Rather than throw the baby out with the bath water, he merely reshuffled his pack, striking upon a winning formula.

OUT OF ADVERSITY

The 4-4-2 was retained, but Siaka Tiene, the last of PSG’s summer signings, was thrown in at the deep end – or more precisely at left-back, where he replaced Sylvain Armand, whom Kombouare asked to move into the middle to partner the club’s 20-year-old academy product Mamadou Sakho.

PSG captain Claude Makelele had postponed his plans to retire in the summer to play one final season and wasn’t about to let it go south so soon. The former Chelsea man revealed how he told Sakho: "I've played with defenders who made strikers scared. You must become like them!"

A goalkeeping change was also in the offing with Apoula Edel coming in for Coupet. The 24-year-old occasional Armenia international from Cameroon looked shaky when called upon last season, especially after his former coach made the stunning allegation in December that he is actually 29 and someone else altogether, namely Ambroise Beyamena. But he has proven to be one of Ligue 1’s best shot stoppers this year.

Kombouare’s tinkering also saw two players who had been told they could leave in the summer surprisingly welcomed back into the fold. For a time it looked like Ludovic Giuly’s only highlights of the season would be an impromptu strip in a Parisian bar, but he has since ousted Sessegnon on the right and faintly resembles the player who won a Champions League winners’ medal with Barcelona.

Meanwhile Clement Chantome, the archetypal modern midfielder who ironically looked like yesterday’s news, took advantage of Bodmer’s injury problems to revive his career and earn a call-up to the France squad.

What happened next was a distinctly un-PSG revival, or at least one that hasn’t been seen since Vahid Halihodzic made very similar changes in the 2003-04 campaign: club aficionados should read Gabi Heinze for Tiene, Frederic Dehu for Armand and Jerome for Edel. That team went on to finish second, something Kombouare no doubt hopes to replicate.

BACK IN THE BIG TIME

Immediately after the changes, his side kept seven straight clean-sheets and got back on the podium. When PSG beat Marseille 2-1 in Ligue 1 for the first time in six years at the Parc des Princes on November 7, L’Equipe’s headline screamed "Paris are candidates". They had dominated the champions, Nene’s assist for Hoarau being put forward as Exhibit A in the case for the club to be considered a serious title contender. PSG had made the jump in quality. After all, they had only recently knocked Lyon out of the League Cup.

So naturally the question everyone is asking is: are PSG for real? The party line is that a top-five finish remains the club’s objective. But Kombouare’s ability to dig deep into his squad and find the answers to turn things around suggests that PSG have greater depth than in recent years, although it’s no secret that the manager would still like to sign an orthodox centre-back like his former Valenciennes protege Milan Bisevac.

As of yet, PSG have shown they can cope relatively well on three fronts – despite losing three times after midweek commitments in the Europa League, in which they have beaten Sevilla and held Borussia Dortmund at home and away already this season.

The chief concern has lain up front. Before the Clasico, Hoarau and Erdinc had scored just twice in the same match together. Indeed, despite their apparent compatibility on paper – the former being tall and good in the air, the latter being short and full of running – Hoarau and Erdinc only exchanged four passes against Marseille and have seven goals between them in Ligue 1. The chemistry is lacking.

The pair’s confidence was in pieces at the start of the month. PSG supporters whistled Erdinc against Dortmund while just a few days later Hoarau was even seen crying after being substituted away to Montpellier. (In case you're wondering, Nene is the team’s top scorer.)

But in some respects Hoarau and Erdinc are exactly why PSG are unbeaten in their last six matches, because though they rarely make the team win, they both ensure the side is difficult to beat, the Frenchman’s height coming in handy at defensive set-pieces and the Turk’s stamina proving invaluable for pressing.

For now, it seems PSG are finally a team again. Side is definitively put before self. Sunday’s 90th-minute equaliser at Lorient showed the spirit within the camp, indicating that the psychological barrier has been crossed. The hate that had once so insidiously enveloped the club now appears to have been channeled in a positive way: "It’s the hate of defeat," says Kombouare with a wry smile.

Today PSG lie fourth in the standings, but with just eight points separating first and 19th place in Ligue 1, crisis is never far away in the tightest title race in Europe.

Marseille finally clinch title as Arsenal-bound Chamakh breaks down

James Horncastle — Mon, 10 May 2010 10:09:00 GMT

For the people of Marseille, Wednesday night was arguably the longest in 18 years.

It started at exactly 7:50pm just over 330km to the north where Champions League chasing Lyon were playing host to second-placed Auxerre at the Stade Gerland.  

Auxerre had taken the lead 20 minutes earlier thanks to a strike from the opportunistic former contraband-running Pole, Ireneusz Jelen, and the game was as good as won.  

Or so the French Connection thought, as Auxerre hadn’t lost any of the other nine games this season in which Jelen had found the net.  

However, Lyon were reading from an entirely different script altogether, perhaps a French-dubbed Diehard, as just before half-time, their full-back Aly Cissokho won a penalty, which Lisandro López comfortably dispatched to level the score at 1-1.

 Back down south, Marseille fans were filtering into the Stade Vélodrome ahead of their team’s match against Rennes at 9:00pm with pocket radios clutched to their ears like mobile phones from the 1980s.

 The conversation was one-way. If Auxerre lost, which they surely wouldn’t now that Jelen had scored, Marseille could win the title for the first time since 1992 when Didier Deschamps, their current coach, was captain.

 A cry of ‘Allez l’OM’ came over the loudspeaker and the fans started their work early, running through a number of Andrew Lloyd-Webber inspired voice exercises that just might have included gargling copious bottles of Evian to loosen up their vocal chords.

Sébastien, a Marseille supporter, told L’Équipe: “It was bizarre, but we had to support Lyonnais.”

No doubt inspired by the 12th man residing in the Vélodrome and not the Gerland, the Lyonnais didn’t disappoint. Miralem Pjanic scored their second, a penalty, at 8:40pm to make it 2-1, and the Bosnian’s timing was perfect.

Auxerre were beaten and with 20 minutes still to go until kick-off Deschamps knew he couldn’t keep it from his players. There was no need for a motivational speech. Marseille’s players would each receive a €330,000 bonus if they won the title. Deschamps apparently just said: “Go play.”

 And that’s just what they did, winning 3-1 with goals from Mamadou Niang and two of their key summer signings Lucho González and Gabi Heinze.

 The wait was finally over. The word ‘deliverance’ was on everyone’s lips. Even the rain and blustery conditions couldn’t dampen what this meant to Marseille.

Flares were lit, fireworks let off and clothes shed as fans headed for the sea in search of a celebratory dip to wash off anything that remained of those 18 title-less years.

Souleymane Diawara danced with his ‘cousin’ Mamade; Didier Drogba sent several texts from London entitled: ‘We are the Champions’; and Mathieu Valbuena, Marseille’s pint-sized winger armed with a bottle of champagne, took a leaf out of Tottenham’s book, only he chose not to soak his manager, but the journalists feverishly typing up their copy in the post-match press conference.

 Deschamps kept his restraint but allowed himself a modest little fist pump. “I didn’t want to dance on the table,” he said. “I am a bad dancer.”

His players then left for a local nightclub called Mistral where Heinze demanded that the DJ play the Gypsy Kings on repeat. But ultimately the party took its cue from America’s finest hip-hop artists as Marseille didn’t stop `till six in the morning. Snoop would have been proud.

“I got up at 7:00am for the kids, but I didn’t feel like driving them to school,” recalled a groggy-looking Édouard Cissé. “I left the car to my wife…” His team-mates Steve Mandanda and Niang even trained in sunglasses to hide the bags under their eyes.

 So when the hangovers subsided, how was Marseille’s title received elsewhere in France? Speaking after Wednesday’s 3-1 defeat, Rennes coach Frédéric Antonetti said: “Marseille are not the same champions as Bordeaux were, Blanc’s side played better football. Marseille are a more Italian-style champion.”

Thursday’s edition of France Football also felt inclined to ask: Are Marseille great champions? Deschamps’ leadership qualities were hailed and rightly so, but it was Jean Fernandez, the Auxerre manager, who was named Ligue 1 Coach of the Year on Sunday.

Marseille weren’t even the best-represented club when the Team of the Year was unveiled; that recognition went to Bordeaux whose spectacular fall from grace – they were once 12 points ahead of Marseille - is credited with being a major contributor to OM’s ninth League title.

 L’Équipe vowed to reserve judgment until next season’s Champions League, picking up on the fact that Marseille couldn’t get out of the group stages this year and only grabbed Ligue 1 by the horns when they were knocked out of the Europa League in March, proving that they don’t have a good enough squad at the moment to compete on the continent.

 OM look as if they will be joined in the Champions League next season by Lille, who were also their opponents on Saturday. Deschamps’ side looked weary, but still went in at half-time 2-1 up despite having Mandanda sent off.

They held out until the final 10 minutes when Tulio De Melo equalised for Lille and Mathieu Debuchy headed in an injury time winner.

Rudi Garcia’s side are now second going into the final weekend of the season, two points ahead of Auxerre who drew at home to Lens. They can still be caught by Lyon, who were lucky to get a point away to Valenciennes on Saturday.

OL were trailing 2-1 when Dianbobo Baldé who had come on to shore things up for les Athéniens ironically scored an equalising own goal for the visitors.

Lyon are now four points back from Lille, but they have a game in hand at home to Monaco on Wednesday, before Ligue 2-bound Le Mans travel to the Gerland three days later.

Elsewhere on L’Hexagone, sixth-placed Bordeaux saw their hopes of qualifying for the Champions League disappear despite recording a 2-0 win over Sochaux at the Chaban Delmas. Laurent Blanc’s side can still make the Europa League if they defeat Lens next weekend and Paris-Saint German do them the favour of beating Montpellier.

 Marouane Chamakh was in tears as he played his last home game before before moving to Arsenal later this month.

The Emirates-bound Morocco international said: “There have been ups and downs for the club, but I’ve always had complete support here. All my family and friends were here and whatever happens, Bordeaux will stay close to my heart.” The French Connection salutes him.

RESULTS Sat May 8 Lille 3-2 Marseille, Auxerre 0-0 Lens, Valenciennes 2-2 Lyon, Montpellier 2-1 Lorient, Bordeaux 2-0 Sochaux, Rennes 2-2 Nice, Monaco 2-1 Nancy, Le Mans 1-0 PSG, Saint-Étienne 0-1 Toulouse, Grenoble 2-0 Boulogne.

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Marseille widen the gap as €100m loss revealed

James Horncastle — Mon, 26 Apr 2010 10:29:00 GMT

RESULTS Sat Apr 24 Nancy 0-0 Montpellier, Le Mans 1-2 Lille, Lorient 1-0 Bordeaux, Sochaux 0-3 Boulogne, Nice 2-1 Grenoble, PSG 1-1 Rennes Sun Apr 25 Toulouse 0-3 Auxerre, Lens 1-1 Valenciennes, Marseille 1-0 Saint-Étienne

Franck Ribéry wasn’t the only one associated with French Football to see red over the last few days.

L’Équipe got hold of a confidential eight-page document produced by the DNCG that revealed the sheer scale of the financial problems engulfing the game in France.

According to the DNCG, the current model is “unsupportable for the majority of clubs, in particular the small and medium-sized ones.”

French clubs tend to survive on TV and transfer revenues alone, devoting a staggering 71 per cent of turnover to paying wages. It is estimated that French football will make a net loss of around €100m across its top two divisions this season, prompting some to call for Ligue 1 to be reduced to 18 teams.

As far as matters on the pitch were concerned, Bordeaux had a full week to prepare for their trip to Lorient on Saturday, leaving fans optimistic that Laurent Blanc’s side would reverse their fortunes after three defeats in their last four league games.

Le Girondins had beaten Lorient 4-1 on two occasions already this season, so if there was ever a time to get back to winning ways it was surely this weekend.

However, despite a fine first half, Bordeaux lost again as Kevin Gameiro gave the Breton outfit a 1-0 win. Blanc’s side now look unlikely to finish in the Champions League places.

Marseille put in a clichéd performance at the weekend, showing the hallmark of champions by beating Saint-Étienne 1-0 despite being absolutely dreadful.

Of course, there were still several positives to be drawn from the result, as Didier Deschamps’ side retained their five-point lead at the top of Ligue 1 with four games remaining.

Mathieu Valbuena also scored his third goal in four games, making the leprechaun-like winger a dark horse for a place in France’s World Cup squad.

The title could almost be mathematically wrapped up next Friday when Marseille travel to second-placed Auxerre who thrashed Toulouse 3-0 on Sunday to extend their unbeaten run to 13 matches.

“The cards aren’t in our hands,” smiled Auxerre’s captain Benoît Pedretti. “If we don’t lose our next two matches against Marseille and Lyon we’ll feel very good about finishing in the top three places.”

Chapeau to Auxerre coach Jean Fernandez for exceeding expectations this season.

Elsewhere, Boulogne’s 30-year-old cult striker Grégory Thil scored his first goal since his return from eight months on the sidelines with a serious ankle injury.

Fans of the Ligue 2-bound side were left pondering what might have been as had Thil been fit for the entire season Boulogne might have stayed up.

His 78 goals over the last five seasons have seen Boulogne move up three divisions and will be needed next year, although he might not still be around with several clubs interested in his signature.

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