The Blues arrived in Qatar full of doubts, they leave vice-world champions after an epic final against Argentina. But failing to get a third world star, the players of Didier Deschamps won the hearts.
by Alexandre Pedro (Doha, Special Envoy)
On this sidelines where he never sits down, Kylian Mbappé plunged his head under his jersey and turns off the light. At this precise moment on Sunday, December 18, a few minutes after seeing his quest for a second World Cup victory fly away after a final as a frenzied as an inconvenience (3-3, 4- 2 On penalties), the Blues striker only aspires solitude or to flee very far from this stadium of Lusail, which has become an Argentinian dance floor. Mbappé had made this tournament an “obsession” and thus justified his vow of silence, briefly broken after the victory against Poland in the round of 16.
A few meters from him, another child from Bondy (Seine-Saint-Denis) walks without specific goal. With one foot, the saving for the goalkeeper of Argentina, Emiliano Martinez, at the end of extension, Randal Kolo Muani failed to finish in French hero a world started a month earlier in a hotel room in Saitama (Japan) , more than 8,000 km from Qatar. This November 15, the player came out of his duvet by a morning call from Didier Deschamps. The coach asks him to take the first Tokyo-Doha to replace Christopher Nkunku, injured in the only collective training in the center of Clairefontaine (Yvelines).
The history of the former FC Nantes striker, today in Frankfurt (Germany), forms a parable, that of a team born in constraint, that of injuries. A third of its holders are on the blank even before the first match (Kimpembé, Pogba, Kanté and Benzema). A reigning world champion team but too young, too fragile, badly fagured by their coach when putting his list, with too many axial defenders and not enough of the side. Why Kolo Muani elsewhere? Why not a Martin Terrier for example? But, goalscorer on his first ball against Morocco in the semi-finals, Kolo Muani is finally the unexpected man of the start against Argentina, the one who tears the penalty of hope at 2-0 when the fate-a final failed in large widths – seemed sealed.
The Blues have lost, but they won a little romanticism, and it is rather unexpected. Because they have sometimes beaten better than them (England in the quarter-finals for example), some have found them a west-German side. This FRG which was still gaining at the end. As in Seville in 1982, against the Blues of Michel Platini. In a country that still sees the ghosts of this lost semi-final, Lusail 2022 punctuates the trajectory of a team capable of almost doing everything: bad luck, criticism, logic, adversity and even a last-minute virus. “It is the whole group that has suffered a situation for a little while. We managed it at best. I had no concern about the players who started the match,” evacuates Didier Deschamps to the subject From this mysterious evil who struck several of his executives like Dayot Upamecano, Adrien Rabiot and Raphaël Varane.
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