Disappointing start.

By: Magnusson | August 6th, 2007

It is never a good sign when the most outstanding player on your team is your goalkeeper. And that’s exactly what happened to us on saturday afternoon in Strasbourg. Just like last year, our side started to a lackluster start against a very feisty – to say the least – opponent and came back home with a 0-0 draw. Before this match, it was clear that Marseille was the top contender to challenge Lyon’s hegemony after six years of undisputed domination.

Everything sounded promising, from the recruitment to the moral of the troups and even the new uniforms were able to create some buzz for the team. We were very quick to congratulate Pape Diouf and José Anigo for their coherent policies on player choices. But on Saturday everything became clear, if Marseille wants to go titillate Lyon, they’re going to have to fight for it because nobody’s going to give them anything, no matter how dope our uniforms are.

And that’s exactly what Strasbourg did . Jean-Marc Furlan’s boys went for our throats from the very beginning of that game and showed some interesting initiative on their home turf and it worked. Marseille only being able to threaten them sporadically. The most dangerous of our chances came at the 16th minute when Zenden managed to send a very powerful strike towards the goal. A world-class save by Stéphane Cassard was necessary to put it away. The most disturbing thing is that Marseille was genuinely outplayed in the midfield where we are supposed to be the strongest. That lead to Djibril Cissé having very little balls to exploit on the front of our attack and the more disappointed team of the two had to be Strasbourg for not having scored in the first half. .
When both teams came back from the showers, Marseille seemed much more decided to win that game and we saw some promising combinations between the ZZ-Tops (I’m trying this new nickname out for the Zenden/Ziani duo) and between Cissé and Niang. But nothing seemed to work and aside from a few individual sequences by Ziani that livened up the game on our side, the second half was also Strasbourg with three clear chances (Fanchone, Lenteria and Mathlouthi) all being masterly saved by an amazingly focused Cédric Carasso. It was clearly Eric Mouloungui that showed up our defence though. His collaboration with Colombian native Lenteria promises some fireworks at some point in the season.

This point is nothing to sneeze at, far from it. Marseille is the type of teams you want to play the game of your life against. We knew that already. But our team will need to be more cohesive and when “he whose name we won’t speak until he returns” comes back, things will gat better, we know it. All in all a very pleasant game to watch even though some sequences were more than questionable. We should definitely change our ways for next saturday when
We receive Rennes and their now head-striker Mickaël Pagis at Le Vélodrome.