By Siddhartha Mitter
The New Yorker - November 22, 2013
The Stade de France, just outside of the Paris city limits, is the site
of France’s greatest sporting triumph: its victory in the 1998 World Cup
final, when the peerless midfielder Zinedine Zidane scored twice in a
3–0 defeat of Brazil. Since then, the French soccer team has delivered
mostly disappointment, and when France took the field against Ukraine
before eighty thousand fans at the same stadium on Tuesday night, all
signs pointed toward ignominy. At stake was a berth in the 2014 World
Cup: France had placed second in its qualifying group, and needed to win
a two-match playoff to earn a trip to Brazil. A listless and clumsy
French squad had lost the first game, in Kiev, two goals to none. Les
Bleus (as the team is known) needed to win by three goals, no easy
task—or miss the World Cup for the first time in twenty years.
After the first match, gloom had descended on the French media, which
anticipated a failure even more abject than the team’s past three World
Cup efforts: the mediocrity of 2002, when the defending champions didn’t
make it past the preliminary stage of the tournament; the epic collapse
of 2006, when France lost to Italy in the final after Zidane was
ejected for head-butting a defender; and the implosion of 2010, when the
players rebelled against their coach and went home early again. Some
reasoned that a failure to qualify altogether might have its
benefits—among them a long overdue housecleaning of the team’s
leadership and the sport’s national governing body. It might even do the
country good, for a couple of years, not to have to think about soccer
at all.
To read more....
No comments:
Post a Comment