LDoes the Coupe de France still interest someone at the FFF? For a week, the cases of Covid have multiplied at high speed in Ligue 1 clubs, without any French football leader sounding the alarm. Only one adjustment was proposed: to allow more players to be registered in order to play at all costs, regardless of sporting fairness. Result, teams amputated part of their workforce had the knife in the throat: be on the ground or risk outright disqualification. No compromise possible, which gave rise to surreal situations, such as Stade Rennes, which has as many goalkeepers as defenders in its group, but the prize goes to the Girondins de Bordeaux.
Christmas turns a deaf ear
With a goalkeeper, a defender and six attackers only available against Brest, the Bordelais had to face a hell of a headache to offer a competitive team. The postponement requests were unsuccessful since the FFF turned a deaf ear and never tried to find common ground between the parties. At the same time, the LFP has already announced the postponement of Angers Saint-Étienne initially planned for the weekend, due to the massive contagion on the Anjou side. Finally, a little common sense… May Noël Le Graët and his acolytes follow their example! Faced with the resurgence of cases, the schedule will inevitably be upset in the coming weeks, and French football players would do well to sit around a table and find a viable solution. But when you see the cacophony at each turn since the start of the season, it’s a waste of time.
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Coming back to Brest-Bordeaux, the Marines and Whites were punished for having simply been rigorous in their health management: testing, detecting and isolating. Unsurprisingly, the mix between adolescents and seniors did not take and the defeat was dry on the side of Brest (3-0). If this Finistère experience will undoubtedly be useful to these young people propelled into the professional world overnight, a century-old competition rich in history like the Coupe de France deserves much better than such a simulacrum. If we add to this a TV broadcast in a certain anonymity and more and more incidents in the stands, this competition is gradually losing its magic of yesteryear.
The calendar, the ideal culprit?
The issue of match overload has come back to the fore in an attempt to explain the impossibility of postponing matches where Covid cases were the most numerous. The elimination of the Coupe de la Ligue, which no longer interested many people (if not anyone), was an argument to allow the teams to breathe and be able, if necessary, to find new slots for these postponements. . A year and a half later, nothing has improved. The situation has even deteriorated with the upheavals linked to the epidemic and the frenzy of international meetings. Today, you have more chances of winning the lottery than of successfully postponing a Coupe de France match!