France - I guess that's why they call it Les Bleus (Part 1)
The French National Team - Dysfunction personified.
This is the second instalment of Played on Paper’s World Cup series, if you want to read the first one, ‘Brazil: A 21st Century Breakdown’, you can access Part 1 here and after that Part 2 here.
For Franco Baresi, football was easy. The Italian defender would glide across the backline, effortless intercepting the opposition’s chances; he would crush their spirits without even breaking a sweat. Ruud Gullit would say of his former teammate:
“A leader at the back, very strong and quick, with an excellent understanding of the game. As a defender, he could do everything. A lot of the time, he would know what the attacker was going to do before they knew themselves! How do you get past someone like that?”
But there comes a time in every player’s career when they meet someone better than them. Sometimes it’s due to age, the young buck running rings around an elder stag, but other times they are just unlucky enough to be locked in an arena with a different type of beast.
For Baresi, it was a bit of both. In 1996 his AC Milan side was at the peak of their powers, about to win their 4th title in five years and he was at the heart of one of the most feared defences in Europe.
However, on March 19th, they would bear witness to a phenomenon. Like Frieza in Dragonball Z, they would be on the wrong end of Zinedine Zidane’s ‘Super Saiyan’ moment.
Before that night, Zidane was a talented but inconsistent teenager. You could see this in the first leg that Milan had won 2-0, the skills were there but he ‘still had a long way to go’.
That ‘long way to go’ was a week. Zidane tore Milan apart.
He registered two assists on the night for Bordeaux, but it was the way in which he cut through the Milan defence of Baresi, Paulo Maldini and Alessandro Costacurta like butter which truly made the world sit up and pay attention (and make Newcastle United who had rejected the chance to sign him at the beginning of the 1995/96 season for £1.2m feel really foolish).
Gone was the boy, and born was the man and Baresi bore witness to this over just two legs of football. No wonder he would decide to retire a season later. He would later say:
“He was as elegant as a dancer – he even used the soles of his boots efficiently. Everything was easy for him; he made such movements that if I tried to copy them I would break my legs.”
Yes, this is an article about France in the 21st Century, but you can’t talk about France without talking about Zidane. If you were to ask anyone (who wasn’t an Arsenal fan) to name a player from the 2000s French side, they would name the midfielder first.
It was his head that would provide two goals and deliver France their first World Cup in 1998, and it would poetically be his head that would snatch away the chance of repeating the feat in 2006… but more on that later.
But going into the 2002 edition of the tournament they were champions and with players like Zidane, Thierry Henry, Claude Makelele, Lillian Thuram, Patrick Vieira and Marcel Desailly there was no reason they couldn’t challenge once again.
However unfortunately they were about to find out why they call it Les Bleus…
Disaster struck very early on in France’s 2002 campaign. Robert Pires who was coming off a title win with Arsenal with performances that had earned him both the club’s and the Football Writer’s Player of the Year, unfortunately, suffered an ACL injury against Newcastle United in March.
The French manager, Roger Lemerre, was incredibly displeased (as you would be). He told the press:
“We know the players who are playing loads of games during the season become very fragile and we think Pires’s injury is due to the accumulation of games. Pirès and [Thierry] Henry are the two players who have played the most this season. They have played around 45 or 47 games. After a certain limit, it becomes very dangerous. They play at a very high level. The competition and the pressures are very high and it can have serious consequences on their health.”
This severely limited France’s options going forward, but it wasn’t the end of the world, that came in a friendly the week before the tournament began.
After arriving in South Korea, Les Bleus had arranged a friendly with the co-hosts. France would win 3-2, but it would prove a pyrrhic victory, for although they had won the battle, this would ultimately go a long way to losing them the war.
As I said, through the early stages of the 21st Century, Zidane’s fate was directly intertwined with France’s fortunes. So when he limped off the field and didn’t come out for the second half, the mood amongst the population of France was straight out of a Victor Hugo novel; Les Miserables indeed.
Originally the doctors believed that he would only be unavailable for two games, but later their worst fears were realised. Zidane had torn the median third of his left quadriceps, in layman’s terms, he wouldn’t be fit for the early stages of the World Cup.
However, the final blow for France had been slowly creeping up on them, as it does for us all, silently chipping away at their foundations. For what truly sunk Les Bleus’ World Cup chances was life’s greatest ailment… age.
The average age of France’s starting lineup in their opening fixture was 30.1. Their youngest player was 24-year-old David Trezeguet, their oldest was a tie between 34-year-old centre-back Franck Lebeouf or winger Youri Djorkaeff (if you want to work out who was actually the oldest, you can do that but for my point, it doesn’t really matter).
And in their opponents were Senegal, who on average had one of the youngest starting lineups throughout the entire competition; only two players had more than 30 caps. It was a fixture with a lot of history behind it; as Brian Phillips would say ‘footnote one - see Colonialism’.
What also stood out was that Senegal’s entire starting XI were currently playing in the French leagues, again ‘footnote two - see Colonialism’.
‘The Lions of Teranga’ would win 1-0, a massive upset that added to a number of good results for teams from the continent over the past decade. They were showing why Africa deserved to be represented on the world stage.
El-Hadji Diouf, who started up front that day would tell FIFA.com this year as the 20th-anniversary approaches:
“Yes, definitely. In fact, we wanted to keep making waves like Cameroon had done with Roger Milla and Co when they made it to the quarter-finals in 1990. And then Jay-Jay Okocha and Nigeria captured our hearts when they reached the last 16 in 1994 and 1998. We would say to each other, “If Jay-Jay Okocha and Roger Milla did it, why can’t we – lads, we can do this!”
But the performance was more worrying for France. They looked leggy and well, old. The usually imperious Desailly could not keep up with 21-year-old Diouf, whose speed and trickery left the veteran 33-year-old’s legs in knots.
“He made such movements that if I tried to copy them I would break my legs.” This was Desailly’s Milan ‘96, the moment he knew that this game wasn’t for him anymore. He retired from international football two years later and moved to Qatar for club football. His partner Labeouf, who had also been targetted by Diouf, retired from France straight after the tournament and moved to Qatar as well in 2003.
But Senegal was not the end of France’s embarrassment.
They would draw against Uruguay 0-0 meaning they were only on a single point after two matches. Unfortunately, despite being an insignificant affair in terms of the scoreline, it did deliver the final nail in the coffin for France’s World Cup chances.
In the 26th minute, Marcelo Romero was on the ball when Thierry Henry lunged in two-footed. Referee Felipe Ramos Rizo’s immediately brandished a red card. Henry looked on baffled, pleading his innocence, but it was the right call.
So France went into their match against Denmark needing a win. They had scored no goals so far in the competition and had just lost their best goalscorer (and also defender Labeouf through injury) so this match went exactly the way you’d expect.
Zidane was finally able to make an appearance but he looked a shade of his former self. The BBC match report stated:
France's own Goliath - Zinedine Zidane - finally made his entrance to the World Cup, but even his talismanic presence, proved unable to inspire his team-mates to victory by the required two or more goals.
With his left thigh heavily strapped, Zidane, the man whose two goals contributed so much to their 1998 triumph, looked a pale imitation of the player who bestrode the Stade de France as France beat Brazil four years ago.
France would lose 2-0 thanks to goals from Dennis Rommedahl and Jon Dahl Tomasson and crash out of the competition. Les Bleus would become the first defending champions since Brazil in 1966 to not reach the group stages, it would become more commonplace after 2002, amounting to a curse of sorts as with Spain in 2014.
These Football Times would make an excellent point about how Spain’s downfall and failure to exit the group was more predictable than France’s in their article about Lemerre’s side:
The very nature of the French footballing diaspora meant that their fall was more difficult to forecast than was the case with Spain at Brazil 2014. When Barcelona and Real Madrid both received thrashings from German opposition in the 2013 Champions League semi-finals, and when Spain themselves lost 3-0 to Brazil in that summer’s Confederation Cup final, it was apparent that tiki-taka was returning slimmer dividends at the top-level. With France in 2002, however, a squad that was spread across Europe’s elite leagues made it more difficult to assess collective frailty outside of international friendlies.
What was the more likely cause was France were ageing and exhausted, their golden age had provided them with a World Cup in 1998, but in 2002 it didn’t have enough in the tank to get them past the initial rounds.
2006 however would provide a chance for redemption, but France shouldn’t get ‘a head’ of themselves.
Ahead of the 2006 World Cup, Petit, Labeouf, Djorkaeff, Zidane, Desailly, Thuram, Lizarazu and Makélélé all retired from the national team (and there may be some more that I missed).
It was an exodus of unprecedented proportions, one that was needed given how easily their ageing squad was picked apart in 2002, but it still left Le Bleus with a massive void to fill.
Raymond Domenech aka the most French man you’ve ever seen in your life was the individual tasked with getting the band together ahead of the tournament in Germany.
He was a very peculiar man, for reasons that will become more apparent as we move towards 2010 (he’s also big into astrology but that’s a whole other thing), but he had been doing a good job with France’s U-21s so seemed like the natural choice as the team looked to renew and refresh.
To put it simply, at this point in time, France stunk. In the 2004 European Championships, they had been knocked out by the eventual winners Greece, which slightly softens the blow of a national embarrassment and they were struggling in the World Cup qualifiers against the likes of Switzerland and Israel.
Domenech looked at his talent pool and didn’t see the answer. So the ex-U-21 manager did something you wouldn’t expect, instead of finding an unknown young talent to make the step up, he did the reverse and convinced Makelele, Thuram and most importantly Zidane to come out of retirement for the competition.
And it paid off with France automatically qualifying for the competition after a 4-0 win against Cyprus. It wasn’t just a case of improving the personnel however, it added energy to the dressing room. Henry said of Zidane’s return:
“What I am going to say may sound over the top, but it’s the truth. God exists and he has returned to the France team.”
So he had his core, but what about the rest of his selection? Well, that was a little more problematic; there were players that clearly were always going to be part of the squad, such as William Gallas, Henry and Vieira, but there was some controversy about the rest of his selection.
Vikash Dhorasoo would be selected in the midfield, which wasn’t the controversial part, but after the tournament, he would release a film detailing what happened behind the scenes. He would then retire stating: "I am not interested in playing for Les Bleus anymore. It's over.” What he probably realised is he had annoyed Domenech so much he would never be selected again.
He baffled fans by leaving out Ludovic Giuly (honestly this was really a ‘Who?’ moment) for Franck Ribery, in retrospect, not a bad shout given how successful the winger would be later in his career. Furthermore, Domenech would state that Fabian Barthez was still his starting keeper over Gregory Coupet (who was just coming off 5 consecutive title wins with Lyon).
Coupet would walk out of the camp after the French press derided Domenech for such a shortsighted decision, but he would later return and be included in the squad for the competition.
So was this a France transformed? Did they leave behind the problems of qualifying and the last four years and take the World Cup by storm?
Well no. As you’ll see throughout this series and life in general, radical change does not happen overnight. France were awful in the Group Stages and once they reached the knockout stages they ground it out until the final.
They got out of the group second with five points and won both their quarter-final and semi-final 1-0 (one thanks to a penalty from Zidane).
This led to a bit of friction in the dressing room. Domenech had invited a tiger to tea and was now hoping it wouldn’t eat him alive. Zidane thought that France’s tactics were too passive and safe; he asked the manager to play two strikers, but the manager disagreed. When asked about the claim he remarked:
“Zidane’s definition of a striker is perhaps different to mine. To me, anyone who finds themselves in the penalty area is an attacker. Anything is possible. Systems are less important than players.”
This may seem like a small discrepancy, but as I said ‘radical change doesn’t happen overnight’ and the seeds for what would happen in 2010 were beginning to be sown. At the moment, player power was a force for good and it would help drive them forward.
A rare bright spot would come against Spain with France winning 3-1 (using a 4-2-3-1 formation, not two strikers), with goals from Ribery, Vieira and Zidane. But France made the final and that’s what matters, and there they would face an equally stubborn Italy side.
France and Zidane’s fates are intertwined. By bringing him back into the fold Domenech had extended the liability on that take and in the final, he would, unfortunately, fall foul to it.
Both Zidane and Marco Materazzi would score in normal time, but it’s poignant that this is not the event that they are known for. No, that would come in extra time.
I think I can’t truly do it justice, unfortunately, but luckily enough in an interview with AS, Materazzi explained the event from his perspective:
"Zidane's headbutt? I wasn't expecting it in that moment. I was lucky enough that the whole episode took me by surprise because if I had expected something like that to happen and had been ready for it, I'm sure both of us would have ended up being sent off.
"There had been a bit of contact between us in the area. He had scored France's goal in the first half and our coach (Marcello Lippi) told me to mark him. After that first brush between us, I apologised but he reacted badly.
"After the third clash, I frowned and he retorted: 'I'll give you my shirt later'. I replied that I'd rather have his sister than his shirt. My words were stupid but did not deserve that reaction. In any neighbourhood of Rome, Naples, Turin, Milan Paris, I hear much more serious things.”
Zidane was sent off and the game went to penalties. Italy would win 5-3, whether this was due to the loss of their talisman or driving force or just because the Italian side were just better at taking spot kicks it doesn’t really matter, what matters is the end result.
Zidane’s red card would have seen him banned for three matches, but due to him already announcing his retirement from club football and then also his return to retirement from international football he could not serve the spell on the sidelines. Instead, he converted it into community service for FIFA.
Zidane would win the Golden Ball for the tournament, in my personal opinion a symbolic gesture for his legendary career (he was probably the best French player but it wasn’t really a great bunch). His influence on the team was undeniable, but his output wasn’t that great (though it should be considered the voting was done before he firmly planted his head in the chest of an Italian defender).
On his return to France, he was hailed as a hero. According to the Guardian, a poll carried out on the French public stated that 61% had already forgiven Zidane for his actions while 52% said they understood why he had done it.
Like Harvey Dent at the end of the Dark Knight, he was France’s saviour for 99% of his career, they didn’t want a villainous turn at the end to ruin his legacy.
On paper the pact of France and Zidane was finally broken, the legacy no longer intertwined, but the seeds of dissent that had been sown during the 2006 World Cup now had ample space in which to grow and the legendary French midfielder would return one last time to change the course of French history.
For this part of the story, it’s better to start at the end. France again exited in the Group Stages during the 2010 World Cup, and Le Parisien would write in the aftermath:
Raymond Domenech... with his incoherent selections, inability to mould a group and publicity skills that make him one of the most unpopular men in the country... Laurent Blanc will arrive in a few days on to a field of ruins. What a waste.
Before we get to the major timeline of events, let me just list off some of the problems that were bad but didn’t cause the complete collapse of the French National Team.
William Gallas crashed a dune buggy and then decided he no longer wanted to speak to the press, Lassana Diarra pulled out with an undefined illness, Domenech didn’t call up Karim Benzema or Samir Nasri and then Franck Ribery became embroiled in a scandal which saw him investigated for his potential involvement in a prostitution ring.
But if France wanted to avoid drama ahead of the World Cup, then how they eventually found their way into the competition was not the way to do it.
If you ask an Irish person what happened that night, they would say the greatest injustice to ever happen in sports ever. A French person would say ‘Nah it didn’t hit his hand’ (in French obviously).
Across two-legs France won 2-1, but that was only because they drew the second leg thanks to a very dubious goal from Henry. Sebastian Squillaci was also offside when the free-kick was taken, but that’s not what everyone is going to focus on.
Shay Given who was in net for Ireland that night summed up the disappointment of both his team and the nation. He told FourFourTwo:
“It was just a sense of disbelief. It was so disheartening, and so difficult to finish the game after that. If you lose a game to a goal with such a really bad mistake by the officials... I don’t want to say ‘cheated’, as it’s not the right word, but we felt very let down by the whole decision.”
Henry would be vilified and named one of the biggest cheats in the history of the game. For context, TIME magazine would publish a list that had him alongside the likes of Tonya Harding, who literally hired someone to assault her major competition.
He was the devil in football boots to the whole world but to his teammates, he was the man who had delivered them a World Cup place they knew deep down they didn’t deserve.
And for his sacrifice, he would be dropped to the bench in favour of Nicolas Anelka and this would prove to be a costly error on Domenech’s part. Henry was ageing out and becoming ineffective but he was still one of the most well-respected members of the squad, especially after the handball.
24 hours before France’s opener the seeds of dissent would start to flower. Domenech had criticised Florent Malouda in training and the winger responded by squaring up to his manager, being held back by his captain Patrice Evra in the process.
The opener against Uruguay could have done with some of that passion, it was a completely turgid affair devoid of any real moments of quality and finished 0-0.
The issue for France was what came after the match. Words hold power, even more so when the person speaking them is a legendary midfielder who carried you to your only World Cup victory.
France’s fate lives and dies with Zidane, that has been the moral of this tale so far, and with five simple words, he set into motion events that would bring down an entire national team.
‘He is not a coach’ - that is all Zidane said in regards to Domenech. But with that statement, the manager lost all credibility and more importantly control of the squad.
The second game against Mexico came around quickly. Again the game sucked and going into half-time the score was 0-0.
We again return to Victor Hugo’s novel Les Miserables, this time not for the sadness of the French people but for the spirit of rebellion. There is always a spark, a flashpoint that sets everything off.
For Les Bleus, this would happen in the dressing room of the Peter Mokeba stadium. A blazing row would break out between Anelka and Domenech, the manager blamed the striker for not breaking the deadlock.
Anelka’s retort would end France’s World Cup hopes. Words hold power, especially when the person saying them is saying them to a coach who has quickly lost the respect of everyone in his squad.
It was claimed by French newspaper L'Equipe that Anelka told Domenech to 'go f*ck yourself you son of a wh*re'. Anelka would rebuke this years later in his documentary ‘Anelka: Misunderstood’:
All of a sudden, the coach came in and called me out by name. When he called out my name with all that pent-up frustration it just came out because I didn’t like it. I didn’t like that he called me out by name as if I were guilty, as if it were all my fault.
'I took it as an attack. It was a big mistake. He had to know I was frustrated. He had to know I was a volcano about to erupt.'
(When asked about the L’Equipe headline) “I looked at my phone and I was like "hang on, what? It's going to say that? Are you serious or are you joking?"
Regardless of what was actually said, the damage was done. France would go on to lose 2-0 and in the aftermath, the scandal would ensue.
After the report broke about the confrontation, the backlash was so huge that even the French government got involved. President Nicolas Sarkozy demanded that action be taken and so it was.
Anelka was ordered to leave the camp immediately but Domenech had already completely taken over. Player power was a force for good in 2006, it was now destroying France from the inside out.
The French players arrived at training the following day, took pictures and signed autographs and for a moment it seemed like the situation had resolved itself without an issue, France were ready to prepare themselves for their final fixture against South Africa…
… and then everything kicked off again as Evra got into a dispute with the fitness coach, Robert Duverne. The captain would then walk onto the bus followed by all his teammates. When they finally emerged they each handed a letter to Domenech which he then read aloud:
“All of the players without exception want to declare their opposition to the decision taken by the FFF to exclude Nicolas Anelka from the squad. At the request of the squad, the player in question attempted to have dialogue but his approach was ignored.”
In the chaos that followed, the team’s 2-1 loss to South Africa seemed to be but a footnote. It would have taken a 4 goal victory to usurp Mexico and qualify from the group which was incredibly unlikely given how France were playing before everything imploded.
Domenech was sacked as you would expect but after the manager was removed they looked to the players. Every single member of the squad was banned from the next fixture and then the five main contributors to the mutiny received individual bans dished out by a disciplinary committee.
Some believed that Evra, as the captain should be permanently banned from playing with the French team including Lillian Thuram and Sports Minister Chantal Jouanno:
"I have nothing against Evra but, as a France player and especially captain, he did not defend the values of sport which are shared by the Republic. I am sure there exist other talents who have not sullied France and are waiting for/ the chance to write new history"
The disciplinary committee instead decided on a five-game ban for Evra and in many ways, this was the right call. France couldn’t let the events of 2010 completely destroy their project, because even if it was in pieces you can sometimes take those pieces and build something much better.
As the old saying goes, some things (and in this case a lot of things) have to go wrong before they go right. And in Part 2 we will see how things started to look up for Les Bleus…
That’s the end of Part 1 of ‘That’s why they call it Les Bleus’, next week we will talk about the fallout of 2010, the start of the rebuild in 2014, the rise of Kylian Mbappe and then finally, Russia 2018 (with maybe some references to witchcraft at the end). Make sure you subscribe to get these pieces straight to your inbox.
Love it.