It was an evening of expectations, it was an alert vigil. The victory is finally there but the intoxication was lacking. At the Parc des Princes, the French team dictated its law to Iceland without managing to capsize hearts. A success acquired in pain at the cost of a harsher than expected fight, of a less successful than imagined score.
The qualification for the 2026 World Cup is already well committed, but the impression left, it remains in a half-tone. We even played a remake of the dirty air of fear when Andri Gudjohnsen thought to equalize at the very end of the game before seeing his success invalidated for a prior fault.
The Blues therefore struggled to find the right rhythm, dominators, present in the intentions but embarrassed with surroundings by a disciplined opponent, capable of bending without breaking. They were also served by their technical approximations, these harmless bullet losses which, in the face of a patient and catchy team, become so many offspring balls.
An Mbappé penalty, full of composure, and a liberating goal from Bradley Barcola on a pass of the same Mbappé will have been enough to ensure the essentials, but the rest looked like a fight of every moment, a game of sometimes rough chess where inspiration has never been completely freed.
A time, the spectrum of an unexpected reverse even hovered over the park. What is the only nation to have beaten the French home team during a qualification match for the World Cup since Bulgaria in 1993 (1-2)? Spain, March 26, 2013 (0-1). This memory has resurfaced when, against the course of the game, Iceland took the lead. On a bourde of olise, Andri Gudjohnsen silenced the spans of an opportunistic and opportune goal.
Vibrations per jerk
The embellished was short -lived: Kylian Mbappé restored the balance in the process, his 52ᵉ goal in selection, which allows him to go beyond Thierry Henry and to settle a little more in the tricolor legend five lengths by Olivier Giroud. A whole symbol in the park, where Bondy’s crack had already marked 116 times in 143 appearances in the Paris jersey. History likes correspondence.
This victory extends the dynamics initiated against Ukraine (2-0) and places France in an ideal position with six points after two days, but it questions. Without Ousmane Dembélé or Désiré Doué, injured on Friday and at the heart of a PSG-Sélection controversy which is not about to go out, the offensive face has impoverished. And France, reduced to ten after the logical expulsion of Tchouameni for a badly controlled tackle, lacked variety to place Iceland actually in the strings, reduced to chopped sequences, isolated sparks.
The park, however full and vibrating for the return of the Blues after a year of absence, quickly understood that it would not attend a fireworks. The enthusiasm has been packed after the first half hour, and even the flashes of Mbappé or the repeated efforts of Thuram were not enough to rekindle the collective spark. The public was content to vibrate in jolts, aware that the case would be a question of patience more than spectacle.
Didier Deschamps will be able to recall that a campaign collected over eleven weeks gives no place to lightness: the main thing is to win, garner, not to put yourself in danger. But the service leaves a mixed aftertaste. We were waiting for a recital, we had an applied effort, sometimes sluggish, as if the engine was caught when going up a gear.
In this park where the history of the French team wrote such beautiful pages under the Platini flood, the Blues did not find the carelessness of the Fasts of yesteryear. The road to the 2026 World Cup is well marked, especially since Ukraine was hung in Azerbaijan (1-1), but this Tuesday evening, the walk appeared higher than hoped. Time will come back to the plume, but for the moment, Deschamps and his family have preferred to count the points rather than the flights.
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