Special envoy to Villeneuve-d’Ascq
Didier Deschamps expected the question and he had already prepared his answer. Asked Monday afternoon about the quality of the pitch at the Pierre Mauroy stadium, the coach did not fail, teasingly, to deliver his opinion. “She’s beautiful, you want me to compliment you,” he falsely asked on a subject that can sometimes annoy him. It must be said that organizing a France-Scotland friendly match on Tuesday evening on a playing field which has hosted five Rugby World Cup matches raises questions.
“We can’t say that we have a very beautiful lawn,” he whispers without adding too much. Even though she is strong, at one point she suffers. » During the closed session on Monday under the northern gray, Didier Deschamps and Guy Stéphan, his deputy, inspected several suspicious parts of the field. If the general impression suggests a respectable quality on the edge of the field, as soon as we gain height, we see particularly deteriorated areas. Same story for Kylian Mbappé, grimacing when seeing the state of the pitch when arriving for the pre-match session. It must be said that after France-Uruguay, England-Chile, Scotland-Romania, England-Samoa and Tonga-Romania, the choice to see the French football team perform on the outskirts of Lille is a challenge.
800,000 euros to change the pitch at the Pierre Mauroy stadium
“I am a coach, if you want to speak to my president (Philippe Diallo)… There are stadium choices that are made, I am consulted and I have to argue,” explains Deschamps who had already been annoyed by the state of the Villeneuve d’Ascq pitch in… 2016 during the Euro after the match against Switzerland. “It’s sad to play on such a pitch,” he joked. “The question of the land has arisen since the construction of the stadium here,” says a regular at the venue. They never managed to find the right formula and the passage of the World Cup, plus concerts last summer, even if the pitch was changed this summer, did not help in the slightest. » The cost of a change is estimated at 800,000 euros and in any case the time would have been too short between the last World Cup match played here on October 8 and the arrival of the Blues football team.
