France may have opened their Euro 2020 campaign with a 1-0 win over Germany on Tuesday night, but it would appear that all is not quite rosy with Les Bleus, with Kylian Mbappe and Olivier Giroud embroiled in something of a petty feud.
The heat seems to have died down since then, but here’s a quick rundown of how the beef started cooking...
What Giroud said
Giroud fired the first shots – expressing his disappointment at not being given enough opportunity to take them on the pitch…
Speaking to L’Equipe TV after scoring a brace in France’s final warm-up match, a 3-0 win over Bulgaria, where Mbappe seemingly refused to join in the celebrations after the Chelsea striker’s second goal, Giroud said: “I was quiet because sometimes you make a run and the balls don’t arrive.
“I don’t always pretend to make the right calls, but I have tried hard to give solutions in the area.”
What Mbappe said
In response, Mbappe admitted that he was no more than “a little affected” by Giroud’s remarks themselves, but he didn’t seem best pleased about the way he had gone about making them…
“It’s more about releasing it publicly,” the PSG star said. “I saw him in the dressing room, I congratulated him on his goals, he didn’t say anything to me. I heard about it in the press. That’s more [important] than what he said.”
So there.
What does this mean for France?
Well, this isn’t exactly the 2010 World Cup – when the players revolted against coach Raymond Domenech in South Africa – but it’s a sub-plot Didier Deschamps and the French camp could do without as they aim to pull off the World Cup-Euros double for the second time.
It’s probably blown over by now (right?), but who can say for sure until Giroud makes it onto the pitch (he was an unused substitute against Germany) and we get the chance to amateurly psycho-analyse the pair of them…
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