relegation and worst defense of the championship, Bordeaux, this monument in peril

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As so often this season, Bordeaux sank on Wednesday December 1 in Strasbourg (5-2 defeat). But to tell the truth, this humiliation did not surprise anyone, so much the Girondins chain the poor performances since the beginning of the year. Sextuple champions of France and present in the elite continuously since 1992, the Marines and Whites are eighteenth in Ligue 1 with thirteen poor units. And, unless there is an electroshock which we can hardly imagine the nature, nothing indicates that the club can get out of this slump. Because the evil is, definitely, deep.

Judge for yourself: the Girondins’ defense-strainer has yielded 37 times in sixteen outings. She has conceded at least three goals on seven occasions, and the unfortunate goalkeeper Benoît Costil has never kept his clean sheet. In Europe, only the promoted German Greuther Fürth (39 goals conceded, only 1 point in 13 games!) Does worse. On Wednesday, the Bordeaux defense suffered further martyrdom, being guilty of gross marking errors and catastrophic raises.

“For the last ten days, we have been working on marking and how not to suffer crosses”, however noted the coach Vladimir Petkovic after the Strasbourg quagmire. Without calling into question the veracity of these facts, this statement questions the coach’s control over his group. Arrived this summer crowned with a Euro noticed with Switzerland, the Bosnian is still reassuring and still thinks “to be the man for the job”. Still, his “paw” is for the moment invisible and his many procrastination between several game systems do not plead in his favor.

However, is Petkovic primarily responsible for this crisis? To say so seems a bit simplistic, especially since the Girondins could have gone by the wayside from last year. Saved from relegation by miraculous victories on the gong, the Bordelais were bought by Gérard Lopez, a Luxembourg businessman, in the middle of July.

With a limited envelope, the Scapular club hastily recruited many foreign players (the Norwegian Gregersen, the Portuguese Mangas, the Ghanaian Mensah, the Brazilian Fransérgio, the Cameroonian Onana, the Dutch Dilrosun and the Honduran Elis) without any a real coherence does not appear. Result of the races: the workforce is now unbalanced, and does not leave much room for maneuver to the technician. In the absence of the leader Laurent Koscielny, the defense is taking water.

Proof of this imbalance, the offensive level of the Girondins is rather correct: with 24 goals scored, Bordeaux has the sixth attack in Ligue 1. In addition to being defensive, the problem seems mainly mental. It is exacerbated by a terrible statistic. The Aquitains lost 16 points after leading in the score. A total that would allow them to appear on the podium.

The Bordelais display a confusing deconcentration as soon as the first goal conceded. “It’s all well and good to lead, but it’s at the end of the match that you have to lead, not after seven or eight minutes. If you don’t know how to hold a result, it’s no use!”, railed on winger Rémi Oudin at the microphone of Prime Video on Wednesday evening.

The defeat against Brest (1-2) on Sunday is the perfect illustration: Bordeaux led 1-0, before conceding two goals in quick succession without ever reacting behind. “THEThe players’ will is not lacking, the intentions and the will are there, but it is more a question of concentration. “, for his part analyzed Petkovic on Wednesday.

From then on, the specter of relegation to Ligue 2 hovers over the castle of Haillan. If Bordeaux is not left behind, it owes it above all to the ups and downs of its main pursuers Metz, Saint-Etienne, Clermont and Lorient. His only two victories are a miracle: in pouring rain and with great success in Saint-Etienne (1-2), after a crazy comeback against Reims (3-2). For the time being, Bordeaux has not mastered any of its sixteen Ligue 1 games. And will quickly have to collect points, on pain of seriously compromising its future among the elite.


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