Like his captain for one evening, Antoine Dupont, the French coach railed against the absence of Goal-l’une technology.
The French team finally stumbled on the last step. Winners of their first seven matches in their qualifying group for Euro 2024, the Blues had to settle for a draw on Tuesday in Greece. Consequence of the two goals conceded in quick succession at the start of the second period while Didier Deschamps’ men seemed to have done the hard part by opening the score at the end of the first period thanks to Randal Kolo Muani.
France then managed to equalize at the start of the last quarter of an hour thanks to a goal from Youssouf Fofana and even thought they could snatch victory in the final minutes from a deflected cross from Kingsley Coman. The ball indeed hit the two posts while making a curve inside the goal, the images suggesting that the ball had crossed the line.
However, the referee, who could not count on the help of the goal-line technology, did not flinch, nor did his colleagues on the video, who obviously felt that it was not proven that the ball had completely crossed the line given the camera angles, leaving doubt to benefit Greece. But despite the low stakes of the evening, the Blues bitterly regretted the absence of goal-line technology.
“What I already regret is that we are at international level. It could have been the same match with qualification at stake, and having a pitch where there is no goal-line technology is a bit…, Didier Deschamps railed, adding: “Why wasn’t there goal-line technology? Because there wasn’t, there it is, it’s expensive… Obviously it’s inconsistent with the high-level requirements. I put myself in the place of the referees, they suffer. The VAR man is 99% sure that it is in there, but there is 1% left because with the image…”
” Good. It has no impact, except that it was one more match won and what goes with it: we would have had a huge success being sure of being first in the Fifa rankings at the end of the year , he continued. Afterwards, it’s not the fact that there is no goal-line technology that made us concede two goals either. But we did what we had to do to come back and win the match. It’s a gaming incident which, given the stakes, is surprising to say the least. »
The French coach was not the only one to have it bad. It was the same for his captain for one evening, Antoine Griezmann. “He missed the goal-line technology! UEFA has a lot of money and can’t put everything together so that we know whether there is a goal or not? We need to ask a little more from UEFA. If they want us to play a lot of matches, we ask them for more technology,” he railed at the microphone of TF1.
