Feeling Bleu
By ROGER COHEN
NYT
BLOEMFONTEIN, SOUTH AFRICA — Just when you thought France could sink no further, it discovers improbable new depths to plumb thanks to outgoing coach Raymond Domenech, whose gift for combining the imperious, the inept and the insulting has few equals in sporting history.
No wonder President Nicolas Sarkozy has called crisis ministerial meetings on the French World Cup debacle. The daily Le Monde went further, drawing parallels between this “strange defeat” and another, on the front lines of 1940.
It noted the “absence of a leader, a strategy, team spirit, effectiveness, these wasted talents, these unused resources and finally, this crushing failure” — all appearing as a “cruel metaphor” for a nation unable to “mobilize its energies.”
Yeah, football’s only a game. Sure. No, it is war by other means, hence all the military epithets — “deserters,” “mutineers” — raining down on the players who have shamed “la France” on the world’s most-watched stage.
(More here.)
NYT
BLOEMFONTEIN, SOUTH AFRICA — Just when you thought France could sink no further, it discovers improbable new depths to plumb thanks to outgoing coach Raymond Domenech, whose gift for combining the imperious, the inept and the insulting has few equals in sporting history.
No wonder President Nicolas Sarkozy has called crisis ministerial meetings on the French World Cup debacle. The daily Le Monde went further, drawing parallels between this “strange defeat” and another, on the front lines of 1940.
It noted the “absence of a leader, a strategy, team spirit, effectiveness, these wasted talents, these unused resources and finally, this crushing failure” — all appearing as a “cruel metaphor” for a nation unable to “mobilize its energies.”
Yeah, football’s only a game. Sure. No, it is war by other means, hence all the military epithets — “deserters,” “mutineers” — raining down on the players who have shamed “la France” on the world’s most-watched stage.
(More here.)
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