1-0 for the home leg against grasshopper. result mathematically excellent, admittedly a bit lucky since GZ hit the wood twice in the first half hour, but on the whole not undeserved since over 90' lyon was really superior. the first match that counts for anything, so the team is not settled in yet but a few particular good and bad notes to hand out. danic disappointed greatly, gonalons only somewhat less, miguel lopes looks promising, and grenier may prove true juni's prediction that clem will be better at FK's than he was.
Aulas said he doesnt want another striker. We've got Benzia and Lacazette as backup to Licha. I wouldnt mind getting Pitroipa however.
Probably not. Aulas just wants the 20 M euros from the qualification anyway. Most of the team is super young and noones expecting a deep run.
You need to go as far as you can because France needs UEFA points. You cant say its not your concern because it affects you directly in that you were forced to play an extra qualifying round. Hopefully u can get out of the group stage at least if you get there.
Clement has some tekkers huh?! Holy hell I wonder how many FK he nets this season. I'm going for 5 . Grasshopper played a lot better than I expected them to, and gave us some trouble. It did some a bit stagnant at times, but I'm gonna chalk that up to being the first competitive match of the season. UEFA coefficients concern me, but I don't think Aulas cares one bit. We have no realistic ambitions of winning the champions league, so making a deep run is really no consequence to him.
since we're only at 15 posts i think i'll just change the title. people all over, even right here in rivers city, are criticizing aulas for decimating his squad before qualifying for the CL. it's not like we lost any kind of trophy. but what we did lose is, roughly estimated, 22M€, which is even more important at this juncture. would bastos, licha, or gomis have ensured us of this windfall? nothing can be less certain, but what is a fact is that OL has pocketed those 22m€ already from selling players, and at the final whistle there were only 72 hours left for that. you also have to think that drawing RS was tough luck, we could have got celtic, maribor... or fenerbahce, the biggest shoo-in. so it was always going to be a calculated gamble, and it's hard to see how it could have been played any better. it's unfair to compare this OL to the juninho/diarra/essien OL. a better comparison might be with the early 90's bu that would be stilted too. but it's no wild-eyed dreaming to say that the club has consolidated its foundations and, whether financial fair-play ever becomes a reality or not, has created a good base for progress in the coming years. a budget balanced or nearly, a new stadium on the way, an augmentation of capital, a plethora of young, home-grown (cheap) talent... even if this coming season will be the first one where a europa league spot at the end might be seen as a good instead of a bad result, it's easy to remain more optimistic about the future than the malagas and newcastles of this world.
ahh, how times change. in the old days a european match by OL would have elicited a couple of dozen posts before i even had a chance to get my opinion sorted out. in a way i'm not complaining: not only was i able too get my 3-match EL pack for 24€, i was able to see last night's match on W9 (free tv). what i saw was not bad. for the first 20 minutes lyon looked pretty good, very aggressive and forced betis into mistakes... they looked not only like the bigger team but the better one. a lot of the long game, but the pitch was atrocious. after that temps fort with a lot of energy expended they started to lose control of the matc but always had something interesting to show... at least between the boxes. few really fat chances, and some pretty scary moments. lopes had a great match, and i was pleased with dabo too. his coming back is a big plus. i all the defense did hold together, even if there were a few very poor decisions, notably by koné, but hey! he's koné! and he has his qualities too. great match also by gomis, really herculean work. and jimmy was OK too. if he was always a bit-player before, now he becomes an important element, and he's always given good effort. lacazette still doesn't seem in the groove, but even so showed some good stuff. all in all a draw away against the biggest hurdle in the group is not a bad result by any means.
Sadly I haven't been posting nearly as much as I used to. Like Inara (remember her?) before me, grad school is kicking my ass, and haven't had much day time to post. Only a bit of reading. Also didn't get a chance to watch the match
Grad school will do that, I remember all to well, as will a combination of full-time job (which when you live in the US is particularly significant for European competition match days) and very busy life that has kind of made me a more intermittent poster on Bigsoccer in recent months. I will say it was a fairly good result to begin the Europa League group, but unfortunately I was at work when it happened.
halftime last night was without any doubt the lowest point in the 22 years i've been going to gerland. can you imagine it? in one week we let in goals by salim arrahce and moussa maazou: two of the worst strikers ever to play in L1.
sorry for the typo which you carried over... yes, against all probabilities salim arrache has come back to france and is with ajaccio. he scored with one touch on a very fast breakaway against a very lethargic lyon defense to to score only his second L1 goal in EIGHTY-NINE appearances.
luckily the second half was better than the first: at HT i was starting to think... si ma drogue est olympique lyonnais, il faut serieusement penser a la detox! still a shame not to win this game; vitoria is not much of a team; OL was clearly superior, the only question was if they would be enough superior to score and win instead of getting another 0-0. the only danger was what we put ourselves into, you can almost say the only balls guimares got were the ones we gave them. but in the end we were just a hair away. the one call that surprised me, all of us really, was that lacazette was taken down in the area near the end and we thought penalty. and the ref gives the portuguese player a yellow card... and then has us kick a corner! i still don't undertand that. a last chuckle: ballon de plomb laureate moussa maazou got a yellow for taking off his shirt after the goal, and then saw red for a very stupid tackle on gonalons at the end. what a cretin.
last group match and OL finishes first and avoids all the big guns. RG went back to a 4-3-3 because of the players he had available. antony lopes made his return: first reports made me think he was going to be out for at least this season (two cracked vertebrae sounds very wicked)but they were only hairline cracks on the little wings... i got the poop because my barman is family with an OL doctor. a. lopes tolisso - bisevac - b. koné - zeffane gourcuff - mvuemba - ferri danic - gomis - plea in the first half OL was able to move the ball very fluidly but lacked conviction in the duels and gave up a goal on a bouncing ball that, even if guimares is no great shakes, gave a logical HT scoreline. the second half saw a completely different lyon, and the 1-2 final score was just as logical, even if at the end they showed a lack of concentration and killer instinct that let the portuguese come very close to equalizing more than once. great match from mehdi zeffane. i've been watching this kid for years and was waiting for this breakout match. he may be our starting RB before the end of the season. saved off the line three times and hit two great shots (one crossbar) that both deserved to be his first pro goal. plea not sharp, tolisso atrocious, ferri poor in the first half but better in the second and a well-taken goal. i liked what i saw of gourcuff: he wasn't MOTM but the rhythm, the balance, the vision and the desire were all there. on a better field (vitoria's is probably the worst i've seen this year, including youth and girl's matches where it's normal to play on a cow pasture) his technique may have been there too. and danic was good enough that i no longer wonder what he's doing on the team. mvuemba i'm still not sure of though.
Guignol, what's your opinion on Garde's coaching this season? He's been getting some flak for his line-ups and tactical approaches. Personally I think he's doing a good job with the men (and boys) at his disposal, plus all the injuries this season.