TEENAGE DREAMER FRENCH MACHINE
Mbappe can bring the electricity for Deschamps’ team of grafters
THE journey has been punishing and the doubters quite remorseless at times. ‘Has he done enough?’ asked L’Equipe of Didier Deschamps as France prepared to face Argentina two weeks ago. ‘Has he made the best use of his time? Can he take us higher in the next four years?’ With this France team, there was no sense of a future — only ‘grey’ the paper remarked.
It is one of football’s enduring mysteries that the man known as ‘Dede’ has delivered so much and yet been loved quite so little. The captain who hoisted the World Cup trophy aloft for France at Stade de France is the manager who has put them on the brink once again, 20 years on, as the outstanding team of this tournament. Yet despite such a beautiful symmetry, the president of the French Football Federation was still being pursued this week for answers to the question of whether Deschamps would be offered a contract extension.
The prime accusation is that the 49-year-old has taken the joy out of the national team and instilled something more moribund, with the goalless draw with Denmark in the final group game perhaps the ultimate manifestation of that.
It supports the characterisation that Deschamps has had to live with ever since captain Laurent Blanc’s suspension from the ‘98 final cleared the way for him to lead the side. Eric Cantona, who always felt that Deschamps had poisoned manager Aime Jacquet against him, characterised him as the dull ‘water carrier’. Deschamps has returned that description with interest. ‘I have carried a lot of water in my time,’ he once said. ‘But those buckets have been filled with trophies.’
Well, Deschamps’s utilitarian ways have won through. France rank just fifth for goals scored here, fifth for shots on goal and 12th for possession. But who could possibly say that the side, who promote their coach’s qualities of graft, shape and technical excellence, do not also bring electricity, too? Two moments of Kylian Mbappe individualism — the 19year-old’s under-the-studs ‘shuffle’ against Belgium and rapier strike against Argentina — were arguably the tournament’s stellar moments.
Deschamps has already made history, too. No European side have ever lost either the World Cup or Euro final and enjoyed a return trip to the final of the other competition, two years later. Only two men — Brazil’s Mario Zagallo and West Germany’s Franz Beckenbauer — have won this trophy as a manager and
player. His boldness has come in selecting the tournament’s joint second youngest squad, and leaving behind two big individuals — Anthony Martial and Dimitri Payet — whose attitude he did not care for. He has brought only nine of the 23 players who lost on home soil at Euro 2016. ‘Less experience, more ambition,’ as Deschamps put it.
At a tournament which will be remembered for some of the planet’s supreme individuals departing early, Deschamps has engendered a collectivism, encouraging Antoine Griezmann to carry some water, too.
As Guy Stephan, his long-time confidant and assistant manager puts it: ‘The important thing is that the team win, not that the fans fall in love with an individual player.’
What struck you when hearing the players talk at their base near Russia’s capital in the last few days was the universal sense of a collective.
‘It’s our great strength to be able to fight for each other,’ said Blaise Matuidi. ‘We are 23 warriors.’ Paul Pogba described the ‘pleasure’ Griezmann had taken in helping him to defend. They all speak of Deschamps in a way which transcends the usual platitudes.
Pogba’s best football has come under this manager — initially as the best young player at the 2014 World Cup. Deschamps seems to understand him better than any- one. ‘Privately, he [Deschamps] puts huge pressure on him, because he knows that if Paul is too relaxed, he can be bad on the pitch,’ one French source tells Sportsmail. ‘It’s a hard balance for those who manage him.’
Though some of Deschamps’ early exchanges with French journaltesty, ists here were what gnaws at him most is the defeat in the 2016 final to a Portugal side that did not even have Cristiano Ronaldo on the pitch for most of the match. There is so little colour in Deschamps’s deadpan utterances that you sat up and listened when he explained ahead of today’s game why France might not win.
‘We lost a final just two years ago,’ he said. ‘At home, against an inferior team missing its best player. That loss shouldn’t have happened. It still stings. And I can’t help but talk about it.’
That was Deschamps the player talking. Some of his old team-mates remember what he told them in the Stade de France half-time dressing room 20 summers ago when they led Brazil 2-0. ‘We don’t let anything go. Not now, eh? Not now.’ He was 29 at the time.
It is not in the character of this prosaic, entirely unsentimental individual, to look back, though.
‘You must live in your own times,’ he said last week. ‘I have never, never, never ever mentioned my own history to them. The [1998] final belongs to a lot of French people who lived through it but the story is different now. I am here with them today to write a new page in history.’