The rebound did not happen. A week after their home defeat against Denmark (1-2), and four days after being held in check in Croatia (1-1), the French team has chained a third game without a win. The Blues had to settle for a draw against Austria in the League of Nations, Friday June 10 (1-1). Dominating but ineffective, the players of Didier Deschamps ran after the score for a long time and only owe their salvation to the sensational entry of Kylian Mbappé thirty minutes from the end of the match.
This entry mainly served to show how far the team was from its best level. Above all, in three meetings, 24 players have been used and the game has always lacked ideas. If the circumstances are incomparable, the Blues had not had a worse start in an international competition since the 2010 World Cup (1 draw, 2 defeats). We have known more serene world champions five months from defending their title.
“I’m not going to be worried, even if it’s not the results we were hoping for. We did some good things but we lacked precision offensively. We had control but not efficiency. It’s a shame that the players were not rewarded“, very quickly tried to justify Didier Deschamps at the microphone of TF1 on Friday evening. He keeps reminding us: the time is above all for the tests.
Mbappé, the savior of the France team this evening gives us his analysis of the match and tells us about the rest with the Blues.#AUTFRA pic.twitter.com/c1aM41eB2o
— TF1 (@TF1) June 10, 2022
The coach preferred to see the positive at the end of a less failed meeting than the first two. To his credit, this gathering has already allowed Aurélien Tchouaméni to assert himself as an essential element and the first tenures of Boubacar Kamara, Mattéo Guendouzi and Ibrahima Konaté have tied great promise. But that will not be enough to hide the fact that the preparation for the Qatari World Cup has already been partly failed.
The idea was to continue working on the 3-4-1-2 system, adopted during the Euro and which had guided the Blues to the coronation during the previous League of Nations. He was abandoned in the second match and there will only be one international window left before joining the Emirate at the end of September (France-Austria on the 22nd and Denmark-France on the 25th).
With just three more matches in sight, the outlines of Didier Deschamps’ future team-type have rarely seemed so vague, beyond the tactical device. Hugo Lloris, Kylian Mbappé and Karim Benzema are the only names that we imagine unstoppable. The places of Raphaël Varane, Antoine Griezmann and Benjamin Pavard are no longer guaranteed. Paul Pogba was not there to counterbalance his missed club season … Competition is at all levels.
This is not to displease the coach, happy with “give lots of playing time” to those who had not had one so far (Maignan, Konaté, Saliba, Clauss, Kamara, Guendouzi, Diaby, Nkunku). In a context of the end of the season (exhausting for the majority of French executives), we did not necessarily see the France team which will play the World Cup in November.It is only against Denmark that a semblance of a typical team could be observed. “I have to deal with glitches and fatigue too”, also downplayed Deschamps after the game against Austria. The latter could not dispose of Paul Pogba and learned of the injuries of Raphaël Varane, N’Golo Kanté and Kylian Mbappé (back Friday evening) in full competition.
The reality of this month of June will obviously not be that of the World Cup. The results are not there, neither is the game, but Hugo Lloris sees things the same way as his coach: “It may not be bad to know difficulties now“. At least the French team knows where to start on its road to the third star.