Zinedine Zidane not only won over the woman who would become his wife. It was the same for many of his teammates, including Bixente Lizarazu, under the spell of the Marseillais from his first training session.
Zinedine Zidane has often told the story of his meeting with Véronique, in Cannes, while he was still an apprentice footballer. “On February 6, I met my wife. It’s snowing in Cannes… I lost my watch in the snow and I met my wife at that moment,” he told L'Equipe on the occasion of his fiftieth birthday, in June 2022. But many of his teammates also remember precisely their first time with the native of Marseille.
This is evidenced by the testimony given by Bixente Lizarazu, who was his partner in Bordeaux before being in the French team. “He was coming from Cannes. First training, his technique, which is really a completely atypical technique, with flexibility of the foot, flexibility of the legs and hips, his leg movements, his rollers. And right away, we were like, “What is this guy?” Who is this alien? » », thus remembered the Basque in the show Clique, on Canal+.
“he had something different with the ball”
“We very quickly saw that this guy had something different with the ball, he continued, adding: “It was great to play with him. » But this understanding quickly went beyond the limits of the field. “With Christophe Dugarry, we formed this trio in Bordeaux. The three of us felt good about football and had a blast for many years, he first noted. We had three different personalities. Duga is the exuberant one, Zizou is the discreet one and I'm a bit between the two even if I'm more discreet than exuberant. But there was a complicity.”
“We didn't just have fun playing together. We had fun spending time together, telling each other stories, talking, Liza once again confided about France 98. For Zizou, if I saw a guy tackling him, I was going to tackle him. If I saw a guy who was annoying him, I was going to go see him. And he would have done the same thing for me. It was something natural. »
