By Le Figaro
Published yesterday at 8:52 p.m., Updated yesterday at 9:04 p.m.
Thierry Henry and the Bleuets provided the essentials, but… Baptiste Autissier / Baptiste Autissier / Panoramic
The Bleuets suffered to win 3-2 against the Ivorians this Friday, in Châteauroux, four months before the Olympics. Thierry delivers his analysis on the L’Équipe channel.
Thierry Henry (coach of the French U23 team, after the 3-2 victory over Ivory Coast ) : “Annoyed? Yes because we had worked on something. Barco (Bradley Barcola) is out early. We found ourselves in a situation where we couldn’t really do what we wanted to do… I think I waited too long to go back to a 4-3-1-2, you immediately saw the difference . There is no comparison between what we did by switching to 4-3-1-2 and before. We recovered the balls high. There is also something in football called winning your duels. And Kiliann Sildillia changed the tempo. We are not going to talk about Rayan (Cherki), because we know the quality. But you look, after the entry of Kiliann Sildillia, immediately on his first ball, he comes high to look for the winger or the opposing left-back.
So annoyed… Annoyed with myself actually since we tried something and I didn’t put it back in place soon enough trying to trust what we had done, worked on… Two days, it’s not is not enough to change that. This is why we quickly went back to 4-3-1-2 after the second Ivorian goal. You saw me talking with my staff, we were wondering whether we would continue or not. If you bring Rayan in, he has to be in the game. So we said to ourselves: let’s go back to what we know how to do and what we’ve done from the start. And we had recoveries time and time again. But above all, we defended by moving forward. In modern football you can’t defend by going backwards. (…) You can’t win either if you don’t win your duels.” (on the L’Équipe channel)
