Are there salutary defeats?
While many observers, us first, fell back into a form of overconfidence, the Blues "missed a march" - Guy Stéphan's formula - against Denmark at the opening of the League of Nations.
The defense of the title is badly embarked but one wonders if basically, this failure is not the slap that the Blues lacked before Euro 2021. The one that tells you "yes, you are strong, but at the slightest relaxation , you can even lose against the Swiss or the Danes”.
The future will tell.
Hugo Lloris is not a big fan of the theory.
“There is never a good time to know defeat, said the captain at the microphone of M6.
It has to serve us, we will continue to work, there is still a long way to go before the World Cup ”, where the Blues will precisely find Denmark (which they will have replayed by then in the fall).
We understand the captain's frustration.
No defeat tastes good, but some deserve less attention than others.
Losing a game on two defensive errors and after conceding a plethora of dangerous chances is different from losing on an accident after being deserving.
Not that France was catastrophic in all respects on Friday, but it often failed.
And where we found it sovereign no later than two months ago, here it is again perfectible.
Hello defense?
Number 1 suspects of this one-night scuttling, the French defenders did not do much to be exempt from reproach, starting with good old Théo Hernandez.
With the exception of a handful of interesting ball runs, the Milanese covered two Danish ball calls from deep for as many opposing goals.
Cornelius thanks him.
Not damned to score more than two pawns in L1 during his time at Bordeaux, the striker made up for it well at the Stade de France.
Honorable mention for his closed angle firecracker on a disappointed Hugo Lloris.
We refuse to fall on the captain.
Without his stops in the last quarter of an hour, the Blues took full price.
"There was a small problem with alignment, with the framing of the ball carrier, and the Danes showed that they also knew how to score goals," commented Guy Stéphan after the match.
World champions thanks to unparalleled solidity, the French seem to have fallen into an offensive imbalance of circumstance.
According to Lloris, there was a little too much enthusiasm in the idea of going for the second goal at all costs, to the point of forgetting the defensive fundamentals.
“When you can't win, says Lloris, you have to know not to lose.
In the end, we were so committed to the attack that there were risks, they knew how to take advantage of it”.
Note that the two Danish goals were scored when Raphaël Varane, released on a muscle injury, was no longer on the field.
In the absence of the Mancunian, neither Koundé, nor Saliba, nor Lucas Hernandez seemed able to replace him in his role as leader of the defense.
And it inevitably becomes harder to frame and align his defense companions.
stewed legs
If Benzema and Lloris are more of the team “we are not looking for excuses, go back to work”, Guy Stéphan and Antoine Griezmann cultivate a different discourse.
Denmark were the first opponent in a series of games that will take the Blues to Austria and Croatia, all after a drawn-out season.
Didier Deschamps' assistant:
“I'm not going to look for excuses but the observation is real, we have players who have played a lot during this season, obviously we lacked physical freshness at times.
We have a team that can be sparkling at times, but it needs spring, freshness, to be able to evolve at its level.
The calendar is like this, we have four games in eleven days, there is another one which will arrive immediately behind [in Croatia on Monday].
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What better way to illustrate this fatigue than the injuries of Kylian Mbappé and Raphaël Varane, almost in quick succession.
The first complained of the knee, the other of the thigh.
Not very reassuring for the rest of the League of Nations, as well as the words of Griezmann, on the verge of telling us that he was eager to be able to do an entire pre-season with Simeone at Atlético because there, he has asthmatic infant cardio.
Griezmann still indisputable?
Five duels lost out of six, a difficulty to exist behind two attackers in a position of n°10 which he is not and therefore, no more volume of play at all to compensate.
Antoine Griezmann may tell us that he “felt well at the heart of the game”, he let the opposite appear.
In the middle, Kanté will have been more dangerous than him and Tchouaméni more often took the initiative, even if his strikes were less remotely controlled than at Louis II.
Grizou, he strives to run in the void and to be everywhere except where a central attacking midfielder should be.
Result, the solutions came exclusively from the sides and, since the centers of the Blues always crashed on a red head, we cannot say that it was a clear success.
Should we then kick Grizou out of 11 and give a chance to a midfielder by profession to make this sector of the game of the Blues exploitable?
Or wait, as usual, for Griezmann to return to form for no reason, because he has a new haircut or a new celebration?
All seem to agree on their desire to do battle with Austria to wash away the affront.
“We will know next Monday if it is a stoppage or not, ends Stéphan.
In any case, it's a defeat that we have to digest and which should lead us to prepare even better for the three games to come.
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