Golazothe Podcast of Sports.fr and French Football Weekly, returns to its latest episode on the traumatic ouster of the six players of the French team two weeks from the 1998 World Cup. Aimé Jacquet, a coach of the Blues consumed by the press (especially by the newspaper The team), had decided to summon 28 players at the start of the preparation and then sent Lionel Letizi to them, Martin Djetou, Pierre Laigle, Sabri Lamouchi, Ibrahim Ba and Nicolas Anelka on Friday, May 22, in the evening.
After a tense training on the field Michel Platini of the National Center of Clairefontaine, the players shared their last dinner with 25 players (Didier Deschamps, Christian Karembeu and Zinedine Zidane arrived a few days later after having played the final of the Champions League Juventus-Real Madrid). Six players then had an appointment in the coach's room at 9:30 p.m.
“You understood, for you, the adventure is over”,, “I assume my choices, I made them on criteria on the ground, I banned the emotional”,, “You have trained well, you have been pros” or “Intrinsally, you may deserve as many selection as many, but I joined the notions of versatility, complementarity, balance”launched Aimé Jacquet, as the book tells The Night of the Cursed (Fayard editions), published by Karim Nedjari in 2018.
Lionel Letizi less nice than charconier
If Anelka expected to leave the group (and had even planned to spend her Trappes license the next week), the other five players did not expect such a sanction. The drama. It was Sabri Lamouchi who asked to leave Clairefontaine on the spot, in the middle of the evening, when the staff thought of farewell the next day at breakfast. A taxi was ordered for Lionel Letizi and Pierre Laigle but the goalkeeper, in shock, was accompanied by the security manager in the car to Metz.
Letizi came out of a huge end of the season with FC Metz, who arrived second behind the RC Lens unlike goals. But the porter trained in Nice paid for his cagade in the friendly match in Russia in March. Letizi was touched on a backward pass from Frank Leboeuf and Youran opened the scoring by Youran from the 2nd minute.
Lionel Letizi, 24, also went behind Lionel Charbonnier, 31 years old. In the group since 1994, “Charbo” was a boyfriend with many players. He was considered a perfect element in the life of the group. The porter of AJ Auxerre therefore accompanied Bernard Lama and Fabien Barthez in the 22. At that time in history, so close to the first match against South Africa at the Vélodrome stadium, Aimé Jacquet had not yet announced his number 1!
