The Saint-Etienne supporters had barely left their seats after the 2-1 victory against Nancy last Saturday when doubts resurfaced. Yes, ASSE had won. Yes, the Greens returned to second place in the ranking. Yes, Horneland and his team had overcome a hurdle. But a few minutes later, a chilling truth emerged from the Norwegian technician’s own mouth. This was no ordinary victory. It was a catchy, fragile success, crossed by existential flaws which worry well beyond the simple score.
A fragile success which alerts the coach
From his press conference, Eirik Horneland did not hide his deep discomfort with the Saint-Etienne performance.
“I’m really very annoyed, very angry,” he blurted out at the outset, before specifying : “The result is one thing, but there is everything else…”. These three small points therefore masked a much more complex reality. The coach was full of shortcomings: “We were not serious from a tactical point of view or on an individual level”he castigates. At 2-0, when the match should have been buried, ASSE had completely erased itself from the field. Nancy, relegated in the ranking, had counterattacked with an impudence that no one expected.
The lack of mental discipline horrified Horneland. “At 2-0, I would have liked us to insist,” he explains, “rather than trying to score again, we got out of the match. And above all, we exposed ourselves. » This shared responsibility between the collective and individuals revealed a gaping fissure. Horneland leads a team which knows how to win big matches (Troyes, injury to Guillou, Pedro) but which cracks against the “little ones”. The statistics were there to corroborate it: Nancy had shot 11 times compared to 9 for ASSE, targeting only 3 Saint-Etienne shots. This inequality of domination says a lot about the guilty relaxation observed in the second half.
Behind the victory, a culture to rebuild
Horneland then delivered a harsh diagnosis of the club’s culture. “We must create a culture of winning”,
he insists, “tonight, at 2-0, rather than making the match easy by doing the right thing, we stopped playing. » He calls for building a “ true discipline », to fix “higher standards at every meeting”. The message was clear: ASSE cannot simply manage; it must dominate, knock out, kill. Otherwise, in Dunkirk the following Saturday, the same excitement risked resurfacing.
Paradoxically, this victory replaces the Greens in second place (29 points) just two units behind leader Troyes (31 points). The Red Star, penalized by its draw in Clermont (2-2), moves away to third place (28 points). But Horneland is not happy about it. Because he knows that without this ” discipline “
that he preaches, without this “culture of winning” that he calls for, ASSE risks collapsing in the face of major obstacles. On Saturday, Nancy threw her last strength forward. And ASSE faltered. For a group that aims to achieve direct growth, this void remains very worrying.
