Funny end of season, unless it’s actually a start; funny match: with an advantage (1-0) hanging in Décines (Rhône) on February 26, Olympique Lyonnais will appear, an eternity later, in Turin against Juventus behind closed doors to settle their 8e Champions League final. With a view of the no less strange final tournament, which will pick up from August 12 to 23 eight quarter-finalists bunkerized in a partially confined Lisbon to finally finish with the 2019-2020 edition of the competition.
No matter where you are, you come close to the psychedelic experience; from behind closed doors to a disparate athletic rise – the Italian championship resumed in June, its French counterpart remained in the harbor – through the bursts of positive or feared coronavirus cases, possibly decimating overnight any juggernaut. However, the Lyon coach, Rudi Garcia, still speaks as if he had not left the world before: he is the only one that the world of football knows. So we hang on to it, and Garcia drew a big five-month bridge (!) Between the first leg against Cristiano Ronaldo and others and the final of the Lost League Cup (0-0, 5-6 on penalties. goal) against Paris-SG last Friday: “We will have to be better offensively to score”, but the final against PSG and the Lyon resistance that night “Are a good basis for work”.
Delta separating a wobbly team and a big one in Europe
In fact, the “good working basis” consisted in getting out of the starting eleven the big goat (Danish defender Joachim Andersen) who made all the Ligue 1 laugh, with the exception of the Lyonnais themselves since they have dropped 30 million euros (including bonus) last summer to bring him in. And to undertake a very singular project: dissociate a badly ruined team, unable to secure – except for an improbable victory in the Champions League – a European qualification at the end of an exercise for the first time in a quarter of a century, of a club that is one of the most powerful in France. An acrobatic design, complicated, but here it is: a qualification against the seven-time reigning Italian champion goes very exactly through the delta separating a wobbly team (one defeat every three games during the truncated 2019-2020 exercise of L1) d ‘a great European.
This delta has a face. And the two hours of touch-and-go with the Parisian stars in the Cup final revealed it: he wears the hard mask of the discipline. This does not have a good press in the plethora of marketing departments of clubs like OL: to practice mainly in the defensive part of the game (for a player, defending is binding while attacking is fun), it draws a restraint. But this allowed the 7e of the last French championship to accommodate Cristiano Ronaldo and Neymar at both ends of confinement, the two lads taking blows or gnawing their brakes away from the goal defended by Anthony Lopes. Discipline: it would have paid off, it still pays off. In the player, its manifestation indicates the prescience of an interest superior to his own person. A framework or an authority, it’s as you want: discipline is the weight of the gaze of others.
As often in a struggling team, Garcia had recovered (captain’s armband, tactical comfort) at his best. But in a reversal of the situation of which top-level football has the secret, the Rhone club has given itself as a guide on the frugal paths – replace yourself, press to lose the ball, run when you don’t have it – of this discipline, a leader like no other: the Dutchman Memphis Depay, tattooed from head to toe, claiming among other fantasies in France Football a posthumous interview with Californian rap superstar Tupac, murdered in 1996.
The weight of the gaze of others
La Folle de Chaillot of modern football: when he talks about himself and a “Need for freedom” that every square inch of his skin expresses, Depay says above all what his sport has hardly any chance of being. On the weight of the gaze of others, who still (sometimes) carry his team like a tutor holds a tomato plant: “I stopped fighting for what people think I deserve or where I should be. […] We can talk about different things, football related or not, but nobody sees me in the Lyon locker room, nobody knows the impact I can have. I give everything. Some see it as positive, others as negative: you just have to get away from it. Do you know what I do when I score? ” Yes: Depay closes his eyes and covers his ears. Emancipation, free will: the very last essential meters on this symbolic battlefield that is the land. We are of course talking about talent. Discipline, and then what? Shave the peaks, so we can see the sea.
Gregory Schneider
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