Thierry Henry, Bixente Lizararu, Marcel Desailly, Laurent Blanc, Youri Djorkaeff and even Patrick Vieira: several former members of France 98 met in Metz on Tuesday for the jubilee of Robert Pirès. The opportunity to also see Aimé Jacquet again. Present the day before at the Stade de France to witness the success of Zinédine Zidane’s Blues against Belgium (4-1), the former French coach (84 years old) enjoyed meeting his players from the time again.
A joy shared by the 1998 world champions, the Saint-Symphorien public, but also those who followed this gala evening on television, like Pierre Ménès. “ It made me happy to see him because I thought I heard that he wasn’t in great shape. I found him very good, very alert, it’s a pleasure”he confides on YouTube, then returning to the tense relations between Aimé Jacquet and the newspaper
The Teamwhere he worked at the time.
“In 1998, I was at L’Equipe, and we remember the terrible conflict between Aimé Jacquet and L’Equipe. In any case, he always had the intelligence or the foresight to exclude me from that. He must have had information that I was absolutely not against him. It even cost me quite a bit of money at L’Equipe at that level”says the former Canal+ consultant, who notably remembers a meeting within the editorial team that went wrong.
“Shut your mouth, you don’t know anything about it, Jacquet is rubbish!” »
“We had a meeting with the 100 people who were concerned by the World Cup, whether they were journalists, photographers… And I asked a question: ‘We have the best goalkeeper in the world, we have the best defense in the world, the best player in the world, we have a tough first round, there is still a real probability that this story will go rather well’”, remembers Pierre Ménès.
“And they told me: ‘Shut your mouth, you don’t know anything about it, Jacquet is rubbish!’. When I arrived, I wasn’t far from the truth…he said. What was delicious was that as there had been a mess with the six excluded from the list, and as I had a great relationship with the players of the France team, I was sent as a firefighter on the day of the Brazil-Scotland opening match… Aimé always knew that I believed in him, that I believed in this France team, and he always had a form of gratitude for me. »
