On D-3 from the official start of hostilities, with a delicious Qatar-Ecuador on the program, excuse the little, we are able to announce that the aroma of the World Cup is finally hovering over Doha. After a less lively Wednesday in the streets of the Qatari capital than the Porte de Versailles knitting fair, the day on Thursday finally started to look like something from an entertainment point of view. It’s not Rio 2014 yet – and it certainly never will be – but let’s say it was better than yesterday and worse than tomorrow. And the Blues in all this? We come there.
Rabiot gives the way forward
The day began with a morning press conference (well, around noon) in the presence of Adrien Rabiot. Smiling and happy to be there – at the World Cup, not in front of the press – the midfielder of Juve returned to what the Blues had missed last year at the Euro and the mistakes that should not be made this winter. “The main thing is that we have to stay united, try to have as few things around us as possible that could interfere with the group. This is the main thing to be able to evolve in a serene climate, he warned. On the ground, if we came out so quickly at the Euro, it is necessarily that there were things that were wrong. It’s up to us to correct them. But I think we have the potential to do much better than at the Euro. »
No rainbow armband for Lloris…
Our colleagues from The Team confirmed what we had already seen coming as big as a house from the start of the rally. The captain of the Blues will not wear the “One Love” rainbow armband, as was once discussed, to support the LGBT+ cause in a country that still condemns love between two people of the same sex. The official reason? The silence of FIFA to an email request from the FFF, which wanted to know if it risked being sanctioned in the event that the players decided to wear the armband.
A very comfortable and somewhat easy pretext in the sense that Hugo Lloris had warned from the start of the gathering, like its president Noël Le Graët, that he preferred to respect the laws and customs in force in a country which welcome. Unlike the English, who announced that they would go all the way to defend the cause, sanction or not.
Dembouz and a 4-2-3-1 against Australia?
If Thursday’s training was behind closed doors, journalists from The Team obviously managed to force the lock one way or another as they announced the system of play and the likely line-up for Tuesday’s game against Australia. While Benzema and Varane still trained separately, Didier Deschamps still made a set-up on Friday evening. As it stands, we could therefore start in 4-2-3-1 with an Upamecano-Konaté hinge (if Varane is not recovered by then) and a thunderous offensive quartet with Dembélé and Mbappé on the sides, Griezmann as a playmaker and Giroud (if Benzema etc etc …) up front. Do we validate? We validate.
The program of the day
The identity of the two players who will face the press on Saturday afternoon (5:30 p.m. in Doha, 3:30 p.m. in Paris) is not yet known at the time of writing these li… Ha well yes, wait, it just fell friends! If that’s not timing, we don’t know. It will therefore be the Monegasque doublet Axel Disasi and Youssouf Fofana. The rest is classic, training at the Al Sadd stadium around 7 p.m.