Giroud scored his 52nd goal for his country and deserved the ovation but Mbappé scored twice to ensure win against PolandA couple of days ago the France squad posed for a photo in which each player returned to their roots by donning the shirt of their first amateur team. For Olivier Giroud, now France’s all-time male record goalscorer, it was the red of Olympique Club de Froges, whose clubhouse 20km from Grenoble in south-east France is appropriately decorated for the World Cup. For Kylian Mbappé, the man who will surely overtake him, it was the green of AS Bondy, a team in a northern suburb of Paris. Even on Giroud’s big night, the masterful and electric Mbappé was able to...
France have lost top players before this World Cup but they still have their razor-sharp centre-forward to score and set up goalsWith 44 minutes gone at the vast, craning, wildly over-engineered Al Janoub Stadium, Kylian Mbappé did something extraordinary, perhaps even unique in modern World Cup history. Basically, he missed an open goal from six yards out. No great shakes. It happens. Ball, bounce, angles, collisions.This is still a kind of physical chaos. Continue reading...
Reference to Hillsborough in pre-match intelligence points to negligence of French police in dealing with Liverpool fansThe truly shocking revelation about the disastrous approach of the French police at the Champions League final in Paris appeared in plain sight in the first, flawed official report into the near-disaster released last Friday. Perhaps unwittingly from the report’s author, Michel Cadot, an official working in France’s sports ministry, it illuminated most clearly so far why European football’s showpiece evening descended into brutality and chaos.The single sentence about police “intelligence” before the match has provided the first glimpse of an explanation as to why the officers were so tooled-up, and acted like self-appointed last-ditch defenders of civilisation rather than guardians of safety for...
There are plenty of one-sided qualifiers but within them lies a reminder that football does not exist to serve the wealthyIt was the eighth goal that felt most primitive of all. All night long at the Parc des Princes, France had been flaying Kazakhstan with a baying relish that seemed to skirt the boundary between sport and ritual.Three minutes from time, with the score 7-0 and France’s passage to the World Cup long since secured, Kylian Mbappé chased after Moussa Diaby’s through pass with the Kazakh centre-half Nuraly Alip also in pursuit. Continue reading...
If Les Bleus perform in the Nations League final, Deschamps can claim to be the man to lead them into a glorious new phaseBefore his country’s thrilling win over Belgium on Thursday, Hugo Lloris said he could sense something special in the air around the France camp. That smelt like ordure by half-time in the Nations League semi-final, when Belgium were 2-0 up and Les Bleus, if not quite stinking out Turin, looked off-colour.But by the time Theo Hernández arrowed in a fabulous last-minute goal in a 3-2 victory, it was fair to wonder whether we had witnessed not just an extraordinary turnaround, but a more substantial transformation of France. Are the world champions at last going to fulfil their...