Pluck and Youth and Merited Draws
Rennes often gets depicted as a young team, an up and comer. In yesterday's match against Lille, only one player who made it out on the pitch in Red and Black was older than 25; the relatively ancient 29-year old Julien Feret went off before halftime as Rennes needed to realign defensively after a red card. For comparison, their opponents last night, the defending Ligue 1 champs, had three 30+ starters and another come on as a sub (they also started an 18-year old defender and feature Eden Hazard, all of 21 years, as they star, so let's not go too far in this contrast).
Rennes' youth allows for easy storylines, sometimes. A few weeks ago they hosted Marseille, a more experienced, seasoned, historically strong team. Rennes started out brightly that match, scoring an early goal of an effective full court press and winning the midfield battles for most of the first half. Loic Remy flicked an innocent cross that flicked off of Rennes defender Onyekachi Apam's head and into the net to tie the match just before halftime, and in the second half the momentum and experience carried Marseille to a more dominant performance and an eventual 2-1 win. The next week, Rennes played away against AS Nancy, a team fighting off relegation, and failed to assert themselves on an icy pitch and amid generally difficult conditions, and were lucky to escape with a draw. Youth and lack of composure, it might seem, cost them at least four points, crucial as they fight for 4th place and a Europa League spot.
It seemed like that might be the story again against Lille. The 1st half was largely even, though if the match were to be halted at the 40-minute mark and awarded on appearance, the decision would have favored Rennes. The Brittany club plays a pressing style when they don't have the ball, leading to turnovers and quick goal scoring chances, as in the Marseille game. They didn't create many chances against Lille, but the attacking led to them getting their fair share of the ball, and Lille struggled to adjust on the road.
Things changed abruptly, as they can in football. Apam, unfortunate victim in the Marseille game, earned a ticky-tack yellow card for a from-behind standing stab at the ball in the 37th minute near the mid-field line. It should have been a foul, but was a very soft card. Whether that rattled Apam or the next minute came as coincidence, a minute later in a slightly deeper defensive position, Apam made a late play for the ball on Joe Cole (loanee from Chelsea) and got a deserved yellow card. But seeing as it was the second one and that the referee couldn't take back the soft first one, Apam received a red card and immediate ejection. As one might expect with youth and lack of composure, Rennes conceded on the resultant free kick, though there wasn't much they could do - Hazard fired a perfect ball from 35 meters out or so into the center of the box, whence Aurélien Chedjou nodded it backwards over a slightly off his line Benoît Costil. The Rennes keeper could do nothing but watch the ball arc perfectly over his head and into the net. Just like that, game over it seemed.
Rennes didn't inspire much confidence in the final minutes of the half, and Lille could have quickly added another, but it remained 0-1 at the break. Frederic Antonetti, the ruddy Corsican Rennes manager, looks like the sort who could light a fire up many a Rennais cul, a fire needed to overcome a 1-goal and 1-man disadvantage.
Whatever he said worked, though, and Rennes played even or better than Lille for much of the second half. They missed three great chances to equalize in excruciating fashion: Mevlut Erding, purchased in the Winter Transfer Market from Paris St. Germain, split a couple Lille defenders in the box on his dribble before having his finish stolen from his cocked right foot by his own teammate, Vincent Pajot, who fired high; Romain Danzé, captain of the team, missed a relatively easy tap-in off a corner that fell to his feet 4 meters in front of the far post; Yann M'Vila took a perfect cross from Danzé a few minutes later and sent it from 5 meters in front of the net to 5 meters over it. Again, bad luck and inexperience seemed poised to leave Rennes further mired in mid-table mediocrity.
Lille for their part was just as wasteful. They got almost as many opportunities (in and of itself an indictment considering their man advantage), and when they put a strong boot to it, they put the ball on target: Costil saved the match for Rennes several times, including on a great Cole shot from the top of the box that Costil just met with his fingertips. More often, though, Lille gave the ball away in Rennes' penalty area, as much due to sloppy and half-finished attacking efforts as any resourceful defending. A title contender so profligate with scoring opportunities and lax defensively against a team in a corner like Rennes must see ill omens for their championship chances.
Of course, things change quickly in a season just as they do in a game. European football seems plagued even more than the U.S. by in the moment impatience and constant "what have you done for me lately" accounting, which leads to many mid-season firings of coaches and hasty player transfers and signings. Ligue 1, in starting to attract foreign uberwealthy investors like the Qataris who bought PSG, are hardly immune to these pressures - indeed, PSG replaced their manager Antoine Kombouare in December despite leading the league at the time.
On February 18th, before Week 24 kicked off, the talk was of Lille in crisis. Since the winter break, they had been knocked out of both league and national cups, dropped two of three Ligue 1 matches, one of which came to a surging threat in Marseille, the other a dramatic 4-5 home loss to Bordeaux. They trailed PSG by 11 points and Montpelier by 10, and Lyon had caught up to them for the last Champions League spot in 3rd place. Hazard has made clear that he is leaving France in the summer. Lille blew a chance to advance to the Champions League knockout round this year in dramatic fashion, while Marseille and Lyon advanced in similarly dramatic fashion. Things seemed stark for the northern club.
And then they won away at Lorient (like Rennes, a club from Brittany). And then they won a mid-week game away at Sochaux, the bottom-dweller of the league at the moment, in a game rescheduled due to wintry conditions two weeks earlier. Montpelier and PSG tied the week before, and on Saturday PSG tied again with Lyon. Entering Sunday's game, Lille was suddenly 8 points back of the leaders (now Montpelier) and 7 of 2nd place, with a game in hand. The only team within 10 points below them to win this week was Toulouse. Lille found themselves with the same number of points as they had at this stage a year ago when they won the title, and with a prime chance to take 9 of 9 points on the road in 9 days and to seal their position in 3rd place as the lone viable threat to this year's duopoly at the top. That was before Apam got sent off and Lille took the lead at the break.
Which makes their wasteful performance all the more disappointing. Hazard made a move in the box and stopped midway, the ball plucked from him with ease. In the 88th minute, both Irensusz Jelen and Benoit Pedretti (both, ahem, in their 30s) had in the area shots on goal; one went straight at Costil and the other required the keeper to make a solid save. All this would be well and good if Lille didn't concede in the final minutes.
They did, of course. On another urgent if not quite desperate push forward in the 89th minute, Rennes found a gap in the Lillois defense. Rennes defender Jean-Armel Kana-Biyik received the ball in a vastly open area, at right about the same spot on the pitch where Hazard took his free kick in the first half that led to a goal. After a second or two to dribble and gather himself, Kana-Biyik sent a nice lofting ball to the far post. Waiting there was Erding and Chedjou. Erding, stopped several times by both friend and foe during the night, beat Chedjou to the ball and got a foot on it in a volley which beat Lille's keeper easily and found the back corner of the net. Rennes held on facing Lille's subsequent mad final push and pulled off a composed, gritty 1-1 tie.
The frustrating thing about draws isn't as much the lack of finality as it is that it barely nudges a team forward in the standings, a mere point out of a possible three. Still, for a "young" team seeking to remain in the hunt for European play next year, a point earned in come-from-behind fashion against a top team, especially one as merited as Rennes', is something to be savored. Vive la jeunesse!
Other Notes
- If this were a comprehensive Ligue 1 blog, as it might someday be, the lead story would of course be about the Lyon-PSG 4-4 thriller. I was still coming back from vacation though, and could only read about it in L'Equipe the next day. Between that game, the PSG-Montepelier 2-2 draw (Guillaume Hoarau tying both games late for PSG), and the aforementioned Lille-Bordeaux game, Ligue 1 is advertising itself as a pretty wide-open, exciting league, regardless of whether or not the level is the lowest of the big European nations (which it probably is).
- Montpelier continues to solidify their Champions League and title prospects. No letdown in beating Bordeaux 1-0 after the PSG draw, they have taken the pole position at one point ahead of the capital club. Montpelier's best ever finish in Ligue 1 came in '87-88, where they took 3rd. Otherwise, they have a UEFA Intertoto Cup and a French Cup to hang their hats on. Nothing to compare to a Ligue 1 title.
The schedule looks decent for them too. They have 7 matches left away and 6 at home. Tough away matches include Marseille, Toulouse, and Rennes, and Lille and St. Etienne will challenge them at home. They only have one other competition to compete in, having reached the quarterfinals of the Coupe de France. PSG is also only still alive in the CdF, but with a much tougher draw as they'll host Lyon. PSG has the same home/away split in the Ligue, with all but one of their home matches against top-half teams (including a match with Marseille, one of the three teams to beat PSG in league play this year), and an away match at Lille at the end of April looming large. Both teams are well favored to take 9 of 9 in the next three weeks, but title races are often decided in the "gimme games" (e.g. see La Liga this year).
- Marseille started the season slow before revving up on a 9-game unbeaten streak in Ligue 1 (16-matches unbeaten in all competitions) that marked them as the dark-horse title candidate should the top 2 and Lille falter (coincidentally, that streak started after a loss to Montpelier and a big win over PSG). Entering Week 24, they were 12 points off the title pace with a game in hand.
That momentum has hit a bump, despite the big mid-week Champions League win over Inter. They drew with lowly Valenciennes at home and then lost to defensive-minded Brest (leads Ligue 1 in goals allowed, tied for lowest in Ligue 1 in goals scored) away yesterday 1-0. Marseille poured forward with class and intention in the second half much the way Liverpool did against Cardiff in the Carling Cup final, but they couldn't snatch the point.
Even if they manage to gain all three points away at Evian TG, they will be 11 and 10 points off the leaders and 4 points off Lille in a hypothetical 5th place. With a heavy schedule likely the rest of the way - they have the game at Inter and the possibility of more Champions League games, the CdF quarters against a 3rd division club that they are highly favored in, and the Coupe de la Ligue finals against Lyon in early April, meaning 10 games in the next 6 weeks - it's hard to see Marseille doing much more than maybe earning the 4th place Europa League spot, which I believe they would get anyway by winning either of the cups.
All this leaves the title race as a two-team affair with the increasingly unlikely possibility that Lille scavenges a spot, and then a 6-7 team battle for the last two European spots (though I think Bordeaux will have a hard time continuing their surge). And of course, the relegation battle that could still involve more than half of the league. Which is another fun part about European football: there's almost always something at stake.
Rennes often gets depicted as a young team, an up and comer. In yesterday's match against Lille, only one player who made it out on the pitch in Red and Black was older than 25; the relatively ancient 29-year old Julien Feret went off before halftime as Rennes needed to realign defensively after a red card. For comparison, their opponents last night, the defending Ligue 1 champs, had three 30+ starters and another come on as a sub (they also started an 18-year old defender and feature Eden Hazard, all of 21 years, as they star, so let's not go too far in this contrast).
Rennes' youth allows for easy storylines, sometimes. A few weeks ago they hosted Marseille, a more experienced, seasoned, historically strong team. Rennes started out brightly that match, scoring an early goal of an effective full court press and winning the midfield battles for most of the first half. Loic Remy flicked an innocent cross that flicked off of Rennes defender Onyekachi Apam's head and into the net to tie the match just before halftime, and in the second half the momentum and experience carried Marseille to a more dominant performance and an eventual 2-1 win. The next week, Rennes played away against AS Nancy, a team fighting off relegation, and failed to assert themselves on an icy pitch and amid generally difficult conditions, and were lucky to escape with a draw. Youth and lack of composure, it might seem, cost them at least four points, crucial as they fight for 4th place and a Europa League spot.
It seemed like that might be the story again against Lille. The 1st half was largely even, though if the match were to be halted at the 40-minute mark and awarded on appearance, the decision would have favored Rennes. The Brittany club plays a pressing style when they don't have the ball, leading to turnovers and quick goal scoring chances, as in the Marseille game. They didn't create many chances against Lille, but the attacking led to them getting their fair share of the ball, and Lille struggled to adjust on the road.
Things changed abruptly, as they can in football. Apam, unfortunate victim in the Marseille game, earned a ticky-tack yellow card for a from-behind standing stab at the ball in the 37th minute near the mid-field line. It should have been a foul, but was a very soft card. Whether that rattled Apam or the next minute came as coincidence, a minute later in a slightly deeper defensive position, Apam made a late play for the ball on Joe Cole (loanee from Chelsea) and got a deserved yellow card. But seeing as it was the second one and that the referee couldn't take back the soft first one, Apam received a red card and immediate ejection. As one might expect with youth and lack of composure, Rennes conceded on the resultant free kick, though there wasn't much they could do - Hazard fired a perfect ball from 35 meters out or so into the center of the box, whence Aurélien Chedjou nodded it backwards over a slightly off his line Benoît Costil. The Rennes keeper could do nothing but watch the ball arc perfectly over his head and into the net. Just like that, game over it seemed.
Rennes didn't inspire much confidence in the final minutes of the half, and Lille could have quickly added another, but it remained 0-1 at the break. Frederic Antonetti, the ruddy Corsican Rennes manager, looks like the sort who could light a fire up many a Rennais cul, a fire needed to overcome a 1-goal and 1-man disadvantage.
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| Looks like Antonetti's fired up. Maybe about a halftime ham sandwich? (Photo from footmercato.net) |
Lille for their part was just as wasteful. They got almost as many opportunities (in and of itself an indictment considering their man advantage), and when they put a strong boot to it, they put the ball on target: Costil saved the match for Rennes several times, including on a great Cole shot from the top of the box that Costil just met with his fingertips. More often, though, Lille gave the ball away in Rennes' penalty area, as much due to sloppy and half-finished attacking efforts as any resourceful defending. A title contender so profligate with scoring opportunities and lax defensively against a team in a corner like Rennes must see ill omens for their championship chances.
Of course, things change quickly in a season just as they do in a game. European football seems plagued even more than the U.S. by in the moment impatience and constant "what have you done for me lately" accounting, which leads to many mid-season firings of coaches and hasty player transfers and signings. Ligue 1, in starting to attract foreign uberwealthy investors like the Qataris who bought PSG, are hardly immune to these pressures - indeed, PSG replaced their manager Antoine Kombouare in December despite leading the league at the time.
On February 18th, before Week 24 kicked off, the talk was of Lille in crisis. Since the winter break, they had been knocked out of both league and national cups, dropped two of three Ligue 1 matches, one of which came to a surging threat in Marseille, the other a dramatic 4-5 home loss to Bordeaux. They trailed PSG by 11 points and Montpelier by 10, and Lyon had caught up to them for the last Champions League spot in 3rd place. Hazard has made clear that he is leaving France in the summer. Lille blew a chance to advance to the Champions League knockout round this year in dramatic fashion, while Marseille and Lyon advanced in similarly dramatic fashion. Things seemed stark for the northern club.
And then they won away at Lorient (like Rennes, a club from Brittany). And then they won a mid-week game away at Sochaux, the bottom-dweller of the league at the moment, in a game rescheduled due to wintry conditions two weeks earlier. Montpelier and PSG tied the week before, and on Saturday PSG tied again with Lyon. Entering Sunday's game, Lille was suddenly 8 points back of the leaders (now Montpelier) and 7 of 2nd place, with a game in hand. The only team within 10 points below them to win this week was Toulouse. Lille found themselves with the same number of points as they had at this stage a year ago when they won the title, and with a prime chance to take 9 of 9 points on the road in 9 days and to seal their position in 3rd place as the lone viable threat to this year's duopoly at the top. That was before Apam got sent off and Lille took the lead at the break.
Which makes their wasteful performance all the more disappointing. Hazard made a move in the box and stopped midway, the ball plucked from him with ease. In the 88th minute, both Irensusz Jelen and Benoit Pedretti (both, ahem, in their 30s) had in the area shots on goal; one went straight at Costil and the other required the keeper to make a solid save. All this would be well and good if Lille didn't concede in the final minutes.
They did, of course. On another urgent if not quite desperate push forward in the 89th minute, Rennes found a gap in the Lillois defense. Rennes defender Jean-Armel Kana-Biyik received the ball in a vastly open area, at right about the same spot on the pitch where Hazard took his free kick in the first half that led to a goal. After a second or two to dribble and gather himself, Kana-Biyik sent a nice lofting ball to the far post. Waiting there was Erding and Chedjou. Erding, stopped several times by both friend and foe during the night, beat Chedjou to the ball and got a foot on it in a volley which beat Lille's keeper easily and found the back corner of the net. Rennes held on facing Lille's subsequent mad final push and pulled off a composed, gritty 1-1 tie.
The frustrating thing about draws isn't as much the lack of finality as it is that it barely nudges a team forward in the standings, a mere point out of a possible three. Still, for a "young" team seeking to remain in the hunt for European play next year, a point earned in come-from-behind fashion against a top team, especially one as merited as Rennes', is something to be savored. Vive la jeunesse!
Other Notes
- If this were a comprehensive Ligue 1 blog, as it might someday be, the lead story would of course be about the Lyon-PSG 4-4 thriller. I was still coming back from vacation though, and could only read about it in L'Equipe the next day. Between that game, the PSG-Montepelier 2-2 draw (Guillaume Hoarau tying both games late for PSG), and the aforementioned Lille-Bordeaux game, Ligue 1 is advertising itself as a pretty wide-open, exciting league, regardless of whether or not the level is the lowest of the big European nations (which it probably is).
- Montpelier continues to solidify their Champions League and title prospects. No letdown in beating Bordeaux 1-0 after the PSG draw, they have taken the pole position at one point ahead of the capital club. Montpelier's best ever finish in Ligue 1 came in '87-88, where they took 3rd. Otherwise, they have a UEFA Intertoto Cup and a French Cup to hang their hats on. Nothing to compare to a Ligue 1 title.
The schedule looks decent for them too. They have 7 matches left away and 6 at home. Tough away matches include Marseille, Toulouse, and Rennes, and Lille and St. Etienne will challenge them at home. They only have one other competition to compete in, having reached the quarterfinals of the Coupe de France. PSG is also only still alive in the CdF, but with a much tougher draw as they'll host Lyon. PSG has the same home/away split in the Ligue, with all but one of their home matches against top-half teams (including a match with Marseille, one of the three teams to beat PSG in league play this year), and an away match at Lille at the end of April looming large. Both teams are well favored to take 9 of 9 in the next three weeks, but title races are often decided in the "gimme games" (e.g. see La Liga this year).
- Marseille started the season slow before revving up on a 9-game unbeaten streak in Ligue 1 (16-matches unbeaten in all competitions) that marked them as the dark-horse title candidate should the top 2 and Lille falter (coincidentally, that streak started after a loss to Montpelier and a big win over PSG). Entering Week 24, they were 12 points off the title pace with a game in hand.
That momentum has hit a bump, despite the big mid-week Champions League win over Inter. They drew with lowly Valenciennes at home and then lost to defensive-minded Brest (leads Ligue 1 in goals allowed, tied for lowest in Ligue 1 in goals scored) away yesterday 1-0. Marseille poured forward with class and intention in the second half much the way Liverpool did against Cardiff in the Carling Cup final, but they couldn't snatch the point.
Even if they manage to gain all three points away at Evian TG, they will be 11 and 10 points off the leaders and 4 points off Lille in a hypothetical 5th place. With a heavy schedule likely the rest of the way - they have the game at Inter and the possibility of more Champions League games, the CdF quarters against a 3rd division club that they are highly favored in, and the Coupe de la Ligue finals against Lyon in early April, meaning 10 games in the next 6 weeks - it's hard to see Marseille doing much more than maybe earning the 4th place Europa League spot, which I believe they would get anyway by winning either of the cups.
All this leaves the title race as a two-team affair with the increasingly unlikely possibility that Lille scavenges a spot, and then a 6-7 team battle for the last two European spots (though I think Bordeaux will have a hard time continuing their surge). And of course, the relegation battle that could still involve more than half of the league. Which is another fun part about European football: there's almost always something at stake.
