The nightmare that is our Ligue 1 season continues…

By: Magnusson | October 28th, 2007

Mamadou Niang scores at the 9th minute his second goal this week, Ronald Zubar at the 31st and Laurent Bonnard finishes at the 51st. Normally that would mean a great night for us and a 3-0 victory. But nothing went our way last night at the Bonnal Stadium in Sochaux. And I mean NOTHING. Marseille managed to lose a game that was ours from the first second. Our offense looking great and the Faty-Zubar combination looking less febrile than you would have expected. The other great news was that Samir Nasri(”The Chosen One”) who originally only came along to keep training with the staff was actually going to play and did play great for the first half and then some. Marseille was in an ideal position to confirm our very positive result against Lens last Sunday and the nice performance against Porto this wednesday. Instead of that, we pussyfooted around enough to have Sochaux believe they were our Bête Noire.
But what angers me is not the fact that we scored two own goals, kicked a post and missed a penalty because that can happen to any team and it won’t happen (god willing) to us again this season. The thing that really angers me is how undisciplined our whole team looked out there once Bonnard scored the second own goal. It was oh so pitiful!
We played a Sochaux team that looked more like your local pub team than something real. Playing catenaccio like some of the best Italian defense , Sochaux locked the game and Marseille players were basically running around like headless chickens (with the notable exception of Zenden who seemed genuinely tired and walked the whole game).
I don’t have any other analysis because there’s nothing to analyze. Just when you thought We were done with our demons, they come just back to haunt us.

And Djibril Cissé didn’t help himself when he asked to shoot the penalty. Marseille has a designated kicker, Mamadou Niand. And he was still on the pitch, was pretty much our best player out there and had the confidence from having scored the first goal. BUt no no no, Satellite had to take it from his hands and kick the most disgraceful penalty I’ve seen this season. It was just him giving every one of his detractors the stick to be beaten with. The look on Mamadou Niang after that penalty read something like “You stupid motherf*****”. Even Richert seemed surprised he stopped the kick given how he was on the floor for five minutes recovering from the very violent contact with mamdou Niang that brought the penalty.
Marseille ends a great dynamic and will have to play Metz on tuesday. It does seem awfully close but these guys have fans worried we could lose to one of the worst teams of this season and just be eliminated from the Coupe de la Ligue. Djibril has already been ruled ou implicitly by the coach this morning on OMTV. We’ll see how that pans out.
Here are the goals. All of them are quite nice

Here is a little clip including the missed penalty of Djibril Cissé.