Kylian Mbappé present at Les Bleus training two days before the match against the Netherlands

It was a long wait, but Kylian Mbappé showed up on the pitch at the Home Deluxe Arena in Paderborn on Wednesday June 19. Forty-eight hours before facing the Netherlands, the captain of the Blues left the locker room thirty minutes after his teammates to carry out individual work with the physical trainer of the France team Cyril Moine. Without a mask, but with a bandage on his broken nose two days earlier, he did a run in the form of a build-up, then a few passes, before practicing shooting against Brice Samba and Alphonse Areola.

The new Real Madrid player was in a good mood. We saw him chatting with Didier Deschamps, miming what looked like his famous duel with Kevin Danso. “The good news is that he was a little better when I met him this morning.”, William Saliba reported at noon, during the daily press conference. However, Kylian Mbappé’s nose was still very swollen and we will have to wait a little longer before seeing him wear a mask.

The training session did not clear the fog surrounding the attack which will begin against the Netherlands on Friday. Olivier Giroud participated in the warm-up and the toro, but abstained from the hitting workshop (like Kingsley Coman). Having played only five minutes against Austria, then spared the day before during the training match against the Paderborn reserve, he carried out personalized split work. He especially stretched his adductors for a long time, a part of the body that has been causing him pain in recent days.

Three other players did less than him on the pitch. Firstly, central defender Dayot Upamecano, who remained in the room throughout the session. His defense partner, William Saliba, joined him after a light jog, like Theo Hernandez, who spent around twenty minutes on an exercise bike. On Thursday, the Blues fly to Leipzig where a final training session awaits them before their second match in this Euro. Didier Deschamps will appear at a press conference and will say a little more about everyone’s fitness levels.