Matthews left feeling green

MICHAEL Matthews admits his Tour de France green jersey hopes are at the crossroads after he was blown away by a furious finale to Stage 10.

The Australian was left without answers as explosive rival Marcel Kittel took his fourth stage win and a grip on the points classification.

On a day where Chris Froome’s 18-second general classification lead was never threatened, Matthews screamed in frustration as he crossed the line in 13th place — a result that badly dented his green jersey ambitions.

He sat outside the Team Sunweb bus with his head in his hands for several minutes before being consoled by teammate Nikias Arndt.

After clawing back ground on hillier terrain, he could only watch as another Kittel masterclass on the flatlands doubled the German’s lead to 102 points. Asked if it was still possible for him to finish in green in Paris, Matthews was matter-of-fact.

“I think that’s something we have to discuss tonight. Do we keep going for it? Or do we give it a miss and stop going for the intermediate [sprints] and just go for stage wins?” he said. “I think we’ll need to have a chat with everyone tonight and see what we did wrong and what we can do better next time.”

Matthews was again irritated by what he believed was a fragile leadout that left him with too much work to do.

“My [mojo] is totally there, but there was a miscommunication with the leadout train today,” he said. “We weren’t where we said we wanted to be in the meeting and it left me with a long sprint to try to even get into the top 15 to get any points.

“We’ve been going quite well, but today was really one of the days where we needed to nail it and we didn’t.”

While mathematically possible for Matthews to overhaul the deficit in the 11 stages before Paris, Kittel’s dominance meant this was a hammer blow.