Sports Poets Society

Coach has taken journey from unwanted one to special one as Champions League fairytale continues ‘The adventure with Brest happened when I did not believe it could happen any more’ 19 Jan 2025 - THE OBSERVER / Sport Philippe Auclair At the very end of 2022, Éric Roy was convinced the ship he had hoped to board had sailed a while ago. How could it be otherwise? He was now in his 57th year, and his last – his only – coaching assignment had ended more than a decade previously. He had resigned himself to carrying on working as a pundit for French television, as he had done since 2012, with a three-year spell as sports director with first Lens, then Watford from 2017 to 2020 sandwiched in between. The irony of the situation was not lost on him: he was better qualified now than he had been when, in March 2010, his home town club, Nice, had called on him to manage their first team. He had accepted the role despite having no managerial experience whatsoever – and no coaching badges either. Ni...

https://www.theguardian.com/football/2024/oct/07/farewell-antoine-griezmann-only-now-will-france-discover-you-were-irreplaceable His talent, skill and character make him one of his country’s all-time greats, but ‘Grizi’ still suffers from a lack of appreciation Philippe Auclair  - THE GUARDIAN Mon 7 Oct 2024 09.00 CEST Not all of the beaten Bleus headed for the tunnel of the Parc des Princes at the final whistle of France’s 3-1 defeat by Italy on 6 September . One of them, Antoine Griezmann, trotted around the whole periphery of the pitch on his own to applaud the crowd. We did not know then, as he must have done, that his 136th appearance for Les Bleus – there’d be a 137th three days later in Lyon, an 11-minute cameo against Belgium – was his last chance to say adieu in the French capital. There was no need for fireworks. No video of his finest moments in blue would be shown on a giant screen, no memento would be given to him in the centre circle. All he desired was a last, privat...

Few other nations would have had the temerity to  stage an opening ceremony in such ambitious fashion ALEX PANTLING/GETTY IMAGES▲  Much of the outside world sees France as fractured 29 Jul 2024 - The Guardian Philippe Auclair Let’s face it, it was a failure . The rain, as if unleashed by a vengeful Olympian god upset at seeing what had become of the original Games, failed to derail the extravaganza devised by Thomas Jolly , as Poseidon’s storms had failed to prevent Odysseus from reaching Ithaca. The saboteurs who paralysed most of France’s TGV system on the eve of the opening ceremony failed too. One way or another, hundreds of thousands of drenched onlookers found a way to line the banks of the Seine to salute athletes and artists alike. And so did the rightwingers who had choked in their café crème when they’d heard that French-Malian Aya Nakamura was to perform on the big night, which she did, horror of horrors, with the Republican Guard in full parade garb, closing her s...