Twenty-five years later, Stéphane Guivarch still hasn’t come to terms with his fanny during the 1998 World Cup…
In 2018, Olivier Giroud was not the first center forward of the France team to go through a World Cup without scoring a single goal despite the Blues’ final coronation. Before the former Gunner, Stéphane Guivarch experienced such a paradox: twenty years earlier, Aimé Jacquet’s troops may have entered the legend of French football by winning the World Cup, but this World Cup had a taste of unfinished business for the former Auxerrois.
And twenty-five years later, the Breton still has it bad. “It still haunts me today, you think about it constantly. It’s a World Cup, it’s in France, you score 47 times in the season and that day you have square feet”, he said at the microphone of RMC, adding: “That’s what makes football so charming! Lilian (Thuram), he has not scored a goal in his career and in the semi-final he scored with his right foot and his left foot! »
But according to the native of , his clumsiness was not the only reason for this zero score. The tactical plan advocated by Aimé Jacquet did not help. “Afterwards, the diagram was complicated too. You have no one in the corridors, so it’s more complicated, he explained. It’s not the same pattern that I had at Auxerre, where I had two machines to center and where it was enough to be present at the first or second post. There was less effort to be made in moving around, in defensive replacement. »
