From our Special Envoy in Doha,
The hour of great vertigo has come. With this round of 16 against Poland, this Sunday afternoon, at a time when we usually digest grandma’s chicken and fries in the rocking chair, the Blues are fully entering into what the Cup the world has the most beautiful to offer to our little hearts of children. These knockout matches which alone can decide the emotional barometer of an entire people for the weeks to come, these matches where everything can become possible or, on the contrary, everything can stop dead. “The team is aware of the event, of entering a new phase in this tournament. If you lose, you go home ”, Lloris rightly recalled on Friday in conf. After Uruguay four years ago, place this year to the Polish white eagle, one-headed, him, from his only real lethal weapon, but what a weapon, Robert Lewandowski.
Even if it means calling on our memories of past 8th finals, let’s leave aside this match on Russian soil, although it is also similar in all respects due to the profile of the two teams, to do a backflip on the arrow of time and come back one day on June 28, 1998, under the Lensois dodger. That day, the Blues face a Paraguay that no one expected at this stage of the competition, a bit like Poland today, and their immunity totem José Luis Chilavert. That day, a bit like today, the Blues know full well what awaits them at the end of the corridor which leads to the lawn of the Bollaert stadium: a mammoth fight, sweat, blood and tears (of joy or crocodile).
Chilavert on one side, Lewandowski on the other
At the end of the line, Henri Emile validates our comparison. “We feared their goalkeeper, José Luis Chilavert, who was presented as a phenomenon at the time. Today, it is not the goalkeeper but the center forward who represents the number 1 danger, explains Jacquet’s handyman in 98. The parallel works well in the sense that it is not so much the team in itself which can be scary, but one of its elements which is far above the lot. Even if the Poles, like the Paraguayans at the time, also have a taste for combat in common. »
This is also what Hugo Lloris and Didier Deschamps repeated to us in turn on Friday during the pre-match press conference. “It’s a team that likes to defend, that likes to suffer, I even have the impression that they take pleasure in it,” described the captain and goalkeeper of the France team. The coach validates the point, but does not want to sum up the Poles to vulgar cupboards with gravelly football mirrors (which they certainly are, we have eyes, we have seen them play).
“This team has had to defend a lot over its three group matches and it defends very well. I would even say that she likes it, and even that she loves it. But it should not be limited to that, tried DD. It’s a competitive team, with a hard core of players who have good international experience, with more than 100 selections or not far, the Szczesny, Glik, Lewandowski, Krychowiak, Zielinski, Grosicki… And young people who are up to it . You have to respect what this team did. My players know that, in self-sacrifice, there is a guarantor, but they also have a lot of offensive arguments. »
You can (sometimes) trust the coach to say what he thinks and mean what he says, and there’s no doubting for a second that he takes this team very seriously. If he claims not to have mentioned the elimination of his Blues by Switzerland a little over a year ago in Bucharest at the Euro, a source of “stress” from which he wants to exempt his players, Hugo Lloris has all the same confided that the coach had had “important words” before this first big meeting of the summer… Winter, sorry. Definitely we will never get used to it. No overconfidence to be expected from the side of the world champions, therefore.
The Blues already saw themselves there
Quite the opposite of 98. “It’s true that we weren’t terribly afraid of them,” confesses Henri Emile. Sweet euphemism when we remember this mythical sequence of the no less mythical documentary Eyes in the Blues, where we see a Marcel Dessailly relaxed as possible climbing the creaking stairs of the Château de Clairefontaine and announcing to his interlocutor on the line: “We pass the eighth and we will see what will happen. We hope to go as far as possible. Well after we play in Paris, it’s good. Serene Marcel. Except that from Paris and the Stade de France, it almost never came into question.
Pushed into extra time by the Paraguayans who were only waiting for one thing, for Chilavert to single-handedly eliminate the Blues during the penalty shootout – “If we reached the penalty shootout, I was convinced that we would qualify,” he confided to The Team five years ago – the Blues only owed their salvation to a liberating kick from Laurent Blanc in the 114th minute. “Fortunately, Lolo scored the only golden goal in the history of the World Cup, because we wanted to avoid going to penalties at all costs. We knew who was in front, ”smiles Emile.
Saturday, it’s another awful jojo who will be in the woods of Poland. And if he is not as skilful on a free kick as the legendary Paraguayan goalkeeper, he is doing not too badly on his line so far. In addition to Messi’s peno (very good) hijacked in the last match against Argentina, Szczesny has been floating since the start of the competition. “He is having a fantastic tournament and I think that if Poland is in the round of 16, it owes it in particular to its goalkeeper,” said Lloris, who therefore manages to have clear opinions if we don’t talk to him. no human rights or LGBT+.
Zidane had missed them in 98
But rest assured, this unbreathable scenario of 98 will not happen to the Blues 2022 if we are to believe the former steward of Aimé Jacquet. “It will be more or less the same configuration as for us at the time, they will seek to create spaces that they will have little or no, since the Poles will play grouped behind. It will therefore be impossible, or at least very difficult, to arrive launched, as a player in depth, but technically we have players who can make the difference. I don’t think it will go into overtime.”
He doesn’t mean it and doesn’t wish it on them. Mental health issue. “The more the minutes passed, the more we felt the fear show, he rewinds. I remember the contrast between the noise of Bollaert and the silence on the sidelines, no one was talking, we were in apnea. “But there is a big difference between this match and Saturday’s match, tempers Riton before hanging up. It’s that we didn’t have Zidane [suspendu deux matchs après son rouge contre l’Arabie saoudite]. They will have Kylian Mbappé. And that changes everything “.