Ousmane Dembélé seduced Deschamps in Kazakhstan. – FRANCK FIFE / AFP
- The Blues won in Kazakhstan thanks to a good overall match between the substitutes.
- Dembélé, Martial, Ndombélé or Digne reassured the staff a few weeks before the Euro.
- The France team will play its last match of the sequence Wednesday in Bosnia, with a more usual configuration.
At the turn of an afternoon without more emotion than that in Astana or Noursoultan, as you wish, a statistic that tells (a bit) what modern football has become. The Blues signed a seventh consecutive victory on the road, their best streak in the field since 1991, at a time when traveling on eastern terrain was more like a cut-throat than a Guide du routard weekend.
But universal synthetic pitches have replaced the snow traps, those that could not, as it happened, be cleared on match day for lack of a groomer available, and the supporters are no longer soldiers in disguise, now that they have no no longer the right to navigate within a kilometer of a football player.
Dembélé’s third goal in the selection
A little local color anyway at the post-match press conference, when our Kazakh colleagues (we will at least have learned that this is how they say) swooped down on Didier Deschamps faster than their defenders for him request a selfie. This does not say anything about a press at the orders, at the passages, since one of them risked his skin by trying a question on Benzema before the end of recess. The French coach laughed a lot – “It was a French journalist who blew it to you” – he who erased the Madrid striker from the table as in the heyday of Soviet propaganda.
Almost the climax of the day, this selfie story. With the third goal for the French team by Ousmane Dembélé, the first for around 125 years. The successful match of the Barça winger, as long as a modest veil is thrown over a pair of needlessly lost balls, has allowed to relifter the whole of the performance of the usual tricolor liners, sent to the turbin at Noursoultan. “Did Dembélé score any points? He has already scored, joked DD on TF1. Yes I am satisfied (with Dembélé), he has the technical quality, he sets a good goal, he can always do things better but when he is like that, he is interesting. Those who play have the possibility of putting things to their credit, unlike those who are not there, that’s for sure ”.
💬 Didier Deschamps, after the victory of the Blues against Kazakhstan: “Obviously, I would have appreciated a little more efficiency”#KAZFRA #EDS #teamFOOT pic.twitter.com/AU2QvlEe5J
– the L’Équipe channel (@lachainelequipe) March 28, 2021
Nobody lost points for the Euro
We think among others of Anthony Martial, who sometimes seemed to show up in blue like the annual medical examination of the box. The Mancunien did not score, but he showed a scam rarely seen in selection. The same for Ndombélé, serious, unadorned, almost as sober as Kanté at the same post is to say. RAS neither for the Lenglet-Zouma hinge, which did not allow the slightest thrill during the rare Kazakh adventures in the depths of the woods. They were a number to risk being thrown from the plane for the Euro, but the French substitutes managed “a serious match, applied”, which in the mouth of a Deschamps is worth as a letter of recommendation for this summer. “I am satisfied with what the players showed, even though we saw a lot of the opposing goalkeeper”.
A reproach which mainly concerned Mbappé, decidedly not in luck this week, with a penalty – caused – missed on his entry, and to a lesser degree for Lemar, who should be less romantic in the area, sometimes. “We had to do the job, we did it” summarized Pogba, one of the few executives aligned entry (TF1). And without anyone caught in the act of playing for his CV or cheering up the buddy who did not choose the best pass option at the time. Digne, in balance with the left-back of Bayern and that of Real, would no doubt have liked to touch more balls in front, but he did not let anything appear at the microphone of the channel L’Equipe.
“Show what we are capable of at every opportunity”
“I think that with each opportunity that we are given, we have to show what we are capable of. Each selection is an important match. This competition pushes us all and it makes us want to give the best of ourselves every time, and it is the France team that comes out the winner every time. A bit silly said like that, but very true about Sunday’s game. The logic of high-level football would now want the tauliers, not brilliant in raising the curtain at the Stade de France, give it a blow Wednesday in Bosnia. It comes quickly.