Spectacular France train wreck injures entire country

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 23/06/2010 (5947 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Sometimes in sports, as in life, things don’t go quite according to plan. There are so many variables, so many things beyond your control. The unexpected can always, and often does, happen.

But sometimes in sports, as in life, you make it extra hard for yourself. You make a series of poor decisions; you invite disaster. You’re a train wreck waiting to happen. And when it does — when the locomotive hits — no one feels sorry for you. You saw it coming a mile away, and there is no remorse. Everyone looks on, dumbfounded, as it hits you. You’ve become compelling for all the wrong reasons.

The French national soccer team falls into this latter category. For the second major tournament in a row, they failed to progress from the group stage and made a quick, embarrassing exit at the first hurdle. At Euro 2008 they bowed out with Romania as Holland and Italy went on. But that was supposed to be an aberration.

It wasn’t. France’s performance — pardon the exaggeration — at the 2010 World Cup will go down as the worst in its footballing history. Having arrived in South Africa as a prohibitive favourite, they played to a dour 0-0 draw with Uruguay before losing convincingly to both Mexico and the host nation, scoring just a single goal in the three matches. Another hasty retreat; another collapse by one of world soccer’s presumed powers.

But this time was different. Not only did France fail to impress on the pitch, they made an absolute disgrace of themselves off it. They caused their fans to turn away in shame, and prompted the Republic’s minister of sport and health to declare them unfit role models for children. The team experienced a “moral disaster” at the World Cup, she said.

Moral disaster indeed. Of course, Les Bleus were anything but model soccer citizens in the run-up to the tournament. There was that infamous handball that actually put them into the competition, and a pre-existing divide between two factions in the squad only grew as the World Cup approached. All it took was a poor first half against Mexico to bring everything to a boil, to set the team unwittingly on the train tracks.

When France re-emerged from the tunnel in Polokwane without Nicolas Anelka, we knew something had happened. And after one of the squad’s younger faction revealed what had been said in the dressing-room — that Anelka had swore at manager Raymond Domenech — we could see it all unraveling.

Three days later the team refused to practice. Captain Patrice Evra got in a scrap with an assistant coach, and the players pounded the bus windows as they implored the driver to take them away from the training ground. They behaved, as French newspaper Le Figaro said, as “spoiled, rotten children.” L’Equipe also weighed in, describing the team as “humiliating and pathetic.” All of it true.

By the time France took the field against South Africa on Tuesday, their World Cup was over, and a handful of reputations were in tatters. Evra was dropped as captain; Abidal and Govou were demoted from the starting lineup; Anelka was once again Le Sulk. And in a stinging rebuke of Domenech, Le Figaro mused that the coach’s authority had been “reduced to the state of a doormat, trampled in front of the whole world.”

It was a shameful way to go out — an absolute disgrace. But it was easy for us to watch smugly as it happened. Sometimes in sports, as in life, a train wreck can be oh so compelling.

jerradpeters@gmail.com