OL or the art of scuttling, a habit that comes (too) far?

• Beaten in Nice while leading 2-0 in the 80th minute, OL exploded in flight.

• A feverishness when it comes to keeping the score that goes back several years.

• Peter Bosz does not seem to have realized the fragility of his troops at the end of the match.

Three days soon and it still stings as much at OL.

Two goals ahead in Nice, provisional second place in the pocket, ten minutes to play, and then the Bouglione circus.

A house scuttling that Lyon supporters have the impression of having seen a thousand times since Pep Genesio, via Rudi Garcia, Sylvinho, and the youngest, Peter Bosz.

A little taste of coming back to it that could not leave the

Excel team indifferent

.

A good hour to review all the results of Lyon since the 2016-2017 season, and heavy at the finish:

8 - Lyon have lost 8 points after the 80th minute of play this season in Ligue 1, at least double that of any other team.

Mess.

#OGCNOL pic.twitter.com/L25Brp709N

- OptaJean (@OptaJean) October 24, 2021

In five seasons, 39 OL games in C1 + L1 + national cups have swung one way or the other from the 80th minute, a huge number for a team supposed to master most of its opponents.

Of these 39 reversals in the broad sense (an equalizer for or against Lyon is taken into account), 22 did not smile on Houssem Aouar's teammates.

That is to say 57% of points lost at the very end of the match, including a few irresistible nuggets that we are obliged to recall:

- The very first time: OL-Bordeaux, August 19, 2017. An incredible lob from Fekir, a red card for Darder, 3-1 in the 88th ... 3-3 at the final whistle after a close by Malcom.

- Confirmation: Monaco-OL in January 2018, 0-2 in the 30th, Monaco reduced to ten… 3-2 on a Rony Lopes pawn three minutes from the end.

Clap clap.

- The double: Hoffenheim in a group match in the fall of 2018. German equalization in the 92nd in the first leg as well as in the return.

- The beautiful series: Signed Sylvinho in the fall of 2019. Amiens-OL?

Bodmer equalization in the 91st.

OL-PSG?

Neymar's goal in the 87th.

Brest-OL?

Equalization of Court in the 85th.

The derby?

Defeat on a goal from Beric in the 90th.

- The masterpiece: How can we forget the title match against Lille last season?

2-0 in the 30th, 2-3 on a last against Yilmaz in the 85th.

There, the neutral follower says to himself that it happens to everyone, and that OL have also reversed badly embarked matches at the end (Depay at the Vélodrome, Cherki at Louis II).

Certainly.

But when we play the L1 podium every year, when we have a workforce better than 90% of the competition, we might rather think that the idea is to gain as many points as possible in the last quarter of an hour, not the reverse.

"Then we switch off"

Let's compare to see with the Lille of Galtier, the one who played the top of the table from the 2018-2019 season.

Including this not folichon start to the season, 19 Losc matches have turned into

.

Thirteen times, these meetings have shifted to the northerly side, that is to say only 32% of points lost at the end!

The Lille lighting confirms the disastrous bias of the Lyonnais from the 80th minute, which we quickly put on the back of a mentally failing group for a few years.

This is the explanation put forward by most of the supporters and even by Léo Dubois, hot, after Nice:

I do not understand.

In the first half, we were a thousand times better than them.

Then we switch off.

It's recurring.

I thought we had passed a level but it is not the case.

Technically, we were above them on the pitch.

We just went crazy.

We have to look at what happened, control our emotions and grow mentally ”.

If we dig a little deeper, however, these repeated scenarios find much more rational explanations, which should lead JMA and Juninho to worry a little about the future.

A team without tactical discipline

At

, we often laughed at Lyon's DNA - “It's rubbish but at least we vibrate” - which gave us its share of beautiful European evenings.

A big mess theorized by Genesio himself one evening when the play fell on the right side: “I don't know if my team is capable of playing a match where we will be content to control, to defend well.

We have a playful team, which likes to attack when it has the ball, which sometimes likes to disorganize itself in order to attack well ”.

Except during the big posters which push him to a saving self-discipline, the OL of the Genesio years was built on a not always readable arrangement of its different individualities, combining a certain offensive panache with a disorganization guilty of the loss of the ball. .

No technician who succeeded him has succeeded in bringing defensive stability to a team that sometimes evolves, to caricature, like Bayern with the ball, and like Montceau-les-Mines without.

A defect in the collective structure which weighs particularly at the end of the match, when the players draw physically:

- Sylvinho tried to make them a boring team to play, to no avail.

- Rudi Garcia made the bet of offensive transitions at full speed (we will come back to this).

- Peter Bosz believes he arrived at Barça (we will come back to that too).

Too clumsy attackers

Beyond his largely avoidable expulsion, Kadewere's match could not better summarize Lyon's weaknesses in the long run: strikers not talented enough to support the model of play. The Zimbabwean missed two huge opportunities that would have changed everything, if we consider that three goals ahead, even for OL, that's enough.

Two failures that recall the end of last season, when Lyon let slip the podium with lost head-to-head shots. Toko Ekambi, affected by a personal tragedy, thus ended the season with the worst e

in Europe or not far, according to the site Understat, with 14 goals scored for 18 who should have been. According to this specific criterion, OL should have ended the season with 3 more points, champion ahead of PSG and Monaco, while Lille outperformed at an unprecedented level (15 points more than expected in view of the content matches).

Already in 2018-2019, OL were the only team in the leading car not to navigate in terms of

, both scored and conceded.

A statistical reality that should have led the staff to choose another tactical approach for the end of the season, even if it is a whole art of defensive culture that was lacking for too long to hold the 2-0 against Lille to the formidable tool.

Coaches unable to close the shop

These are the previous factors which, by force, create a mental fragility in the workforce and not the other way around.

Raymond Domenech, who doesn't just say nonsense, summed it up on the L'Equipe channel, after the derby:

The Lyonnais play, they attack, that's good. But they don't tell the difference. Sometimes, they find themselves in difficulty by leaving boulevards to the adversary. Every time the ball goes back to the other side, they let someone free. There are spaces everywhere, to the right, to the left. It is complicated ! These defensive problems are not today, but OL must move on to something else ”

Does this something match what Peter Bosz wants to bring?

The speech of the Lyon coach was eagerly awaited after Nice.

Would he take defeat for himself, as the circumstances demanded?

No, the Lyon coach publicly criticized Emerson, after asking him to put on the whole match, and defending his choice to leave a Kadewere out of the game until the drama, an option that had already almost cost dearly in the Europa League against Sparta Prague.

His second cold intervention, Monday evening, did not reassure more:

I didn't believe this team could play like that.

It gives me a lot of confidence for the future.

We see a team which plays together, which presses high, with a lot of space in the back, which plays well football ”.

It looks pretty on paper, and even on the pitch sometimes, but does Peter Bosz really know where he fell?

These eight points lost in stoppage time since the start of the season have not fallen from the sky, and OL will not have a three-goal lead every Saturday to rest easy.

On Sunday, the former Leverkusen coach succumbed to the famous

(a fifth defender to finish) that the Lyon supporters abhorred at Genesio and Garcia, as if he had not yet understood the extent of the site.

We wish him good luck.

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