Les Filles de France (Women's NT)

here's the best part: canada is beating the USA at HT. so gold was closer at 70' of our game than bronze is now.

bini used to come see OL play fairly often. if he dares to this season (not bloody likely) he's going to get some pretty serious abuse. soubeyrand has no choice, she has to come once and the banners are being prepared now, believe me. there's a highly defendable view that france lost because bini wanted to play as few lyonnaises and as many juvisiennes as possible (meaning 8 and 2 respectively)...

thiney i can understand. she's usually really good. but soubeyrand has barely put a foot right in 6 months. what kind of twisted logic even puts her on the squad, much less makes her starter and captain?

 

it's not a conspiracy. it's actually an understandable strategy where the mentality of the group, on and off the field, is as important as individual talent; for me, so far so good. amandinegate i can live with... and i wish all the guys i talk with on french women's football forums could too, believe me, i'm a moderate! as for starting tatane (thiney) that i'm OK with too. she's has an excruciatingly bad tournament but she's normally so good that hoping she'll break out of her slump is no delirious utopia. and bini can change his mind when enough evidence piles up, like leaving off his pet pailladine defender ophelie meilleroux when laura george showed she was better. but not being able to see the chasm of liability, the inexorable catastrophe that playing soubeyrand for even 5 minutes entails, hints at some kind of clinical disorder.

18 months ago she was unable to run for more than half an hour. in 2012 she has not actually "run" more than 30 metres in over 300 minutes. if such stats were available, as for the men, it would not only stand out that she runs less than anyone on the field besides the keepers (less than the refs or even lineswomen probably), but that players like abily, bompastor or franco run twice and perhaps even THREE TIMES as much as she does. it souns like i'm crazy. but take a look yourself and you'll see i'm not exagerrating.

 

I was going to make a joker earlier about how many heart attacks guignol had during those last 10-15 mins of play but reconsidered after the amount of drama between canada and usa, regardless I think france has 1 advantage in that canada is pretty much exhausted however canada played very well and will probably be gunning to get something out of this tournament and so will france creating an anticipated 3rd place game, though probably not as loaded as USA vs Japan

 

france has another advantage: they're simply a much better team at least if the last two matchups are any indication: 4-0 in the 2011 WWC but even more impressive was the cyprus cup final : 2-0 with a goal in each half and canada not getting the ball cleanly out of their half on the ground ONCE in 90'. but canada also has an advantage: soubeyrand didn't play in cyprus and i have a sick gut feeling that she'll be captain again in the bronze medal match.

shouldn't happen, absolutely. but can't really be put down to the "defense" either! the first was a surreal shocker by bouhaddi who, if you look at her last 10-12 matches, you will see is an excellent keeper and above all at claiming balls just like that. the second was cigar store indian defending by ONE player... beside those two FK's japan didn't get a sniff at goal until aroung 88' when les bleues were in damn the torpedoes mode.

and look at how those two FK's were awarded: the second is soubeyrand losing a ball by a combination of inattention and total lack of physique, and buss had to come save her bacon with a heavy tackle. the first? i also put it down to soubeyrand. because what the hell is wendy renard doing 40m from goal while japan has the ball marking a player she has no hope of turning with? she's covering the huge gap left by soubeyrand unable to cover even half the ground a player at her post needs to. 2-3 seconds after wendy made that foul soub' comes trotting back trying to pretend she wasn't really that far out of place. i should sympathize... i do the same thing when i play. but i'm 55 year old, 10 kg overweight, and only do sunday kickabouts; i don't have the unmitigated gall to think i can represent my country at the olympics in a discipline where my team can, should MUST win a medal.

 

i sign on almost word for word to everything you say; but even so it would have been enough to win yesterday going away. the japanese weren't very good either. they accomplished nothing. on quality of play the match was still 0-0 on the hour. but the difference after that was that france raised the pressure and the tempo the notch that the japanese weren't able to answer. and that is down to the subs, and primarily down to abily because once france got into the rhythm that had beaten 17 straight opponents thiney possibly could have looked as good as ELS did. all of a sudden there was that one extra player available around the ball all the time. to give nécib the balls and the options. to force the japanese to reinforce the middle and open up spaces on the wings.

bussaglia scared? perhaps. but if she was why did she step up to take a shot she should have left to another? no, she was just too tired. that's how i see it. and she was tired because she'd been playing for two for almost an hour. if bini hand't forced his hand (like always) for his first sub we might have seen catala for bussaglia around 75'.

a last peeve: when soub went off she told cam to take the armband to (club teammate) thiney, even though it was clear she was coming off in a couple of minutes for eugénie. just putting it on camille would have been classier. but better still? let her take it to bompastor. better yet have her wear it all the time. why? because soso's the boss. she's the boss at triple crown lyon, she's the boss on the field for les bleues. she was even the boss (or one of them) at washington. and in the papers this morning you read sarah's and élise's mea maxima culpa , bini's excuses...soubeyrand just as invisible in the zone mixte or in the papers as on the field... and sonia putting all the dots on the i's.

the boss.

 

getting rid of bini would be a godsend. the problem is that the only interesting replacements for him are liar and ouistiti and besides neither of these being in odeur de sainteté in the hallowed halls of our fédé farid's just starting a super neat-o job at PSG and patrice coaching the same players but in different uniforms isn't much fresh air and he's probably already starting to get on their nerves anyway.

 

buss because she was covering ground for two. soub gets winded just singing the marseillaise.

the cause for this is double: abily coming in and mamie going out. it's not so much that cam is a superwoman as the difference between the two being so enormous. an interesting experiment would be to bring soub off for no one and see if there's any observable change in the game.

Marotte [marɔt] n.f. manie, idée fixe. Syn: dada, toquade, obsession. Ang: craze

 

yes, those two. they're both very good.

it is very different. first of all just psychologically, although neither lair nor benstiti have the "feminine" approach of bini... or domenech. but above all the physical difference takes a while to get used to. first reaction of a coach coming from the men's game would be "crikey! none of these girls are any f***ing good at all!" and then, those limitations have repercussions on strategy and tactics, on practice and match management that indeed make the difference between the very top level of women and any pro men's team as big as between CFA and poussins. obviously relatively few men start out coaching girls but they start out with youth teams and get into one groove or another early.

here's an anecdote: my son played basketball at a pretty good youth level, they were champions départementale du rhône minimes excellence, and since the rhone is a pretty big department that's tougher than most ligues régionales. their coach was a young lady who was so good that she got a real coaching job paying better than peanuts at FC Lyon, a fairly big female club. and she washed out in less than a season. no idea what she was doing. so she went back to taking boy's teams to titles year after year.

 

you'll get over it!

i'm going over to laura george's house right after work to put up a MERCI LAURA sign on her gate. she was great this tournament.

 

here's one thing though: a couple of years ago i would have bene the only one here who cared about this at all. so things are moving forward... just like bruno bini says!