Marseille 2-1 Ajax, An unconvincing victory…

By: Magnusson | March 13th, 2009

Despite winning against a young and inexperienced Ajax team, Olympique de Marseille doesn’t seem to have done what was asked of them. As we played for the most part of the game against a 10-man team, we would have liked to see at least one more goal.

When we get back to the Arena next week, all they’ll have to do is win 1-0 at home and we could be eliminated. I don’t want to sound overly pessimistic but I seemed to me that as soon as we scored the second goal, all of our player’s minds shifted to our weekend confrontation against Paris Saint-Germain. We conceded the away goal that is keeping hope alive on the dutch side.

First let’s focus on the positive. Our main reason to be happy is that we can win at the Vélodrome again. This statement might seem strange but we’ve been unable to do so in the past few weeks. Don’t forget that if we didn’t draw Le Mans and Valenciennes [and thus losing four points], we would be ahead of Lyon as we speak.

Second good news is that Mamadou Niang has finally scored again. Our Senegalese superstar who has been mute ever since coming back from his foot-injury (he broke his foot in December) showed a lot of promise and scored an otherworldly type of goal, A Rabah Madjer-esque goal.

The other great surprise is that Renato Civelli, who is living some kind of a rebirth as we speak, held another one of those very solid defensive games. Marseille is the best defense in France right now, having conceded 0 goals in five games and Civelli is no stranger to this. The Argentian who has been fighting for a spot on the team for over a year seems to have immensely improved inn a year. We could have used him at some points earlier in the season.

Now with he bad news. First we lost Laurent Bonnart to a groin injury. the diminutive right-back will be out for at least two months and may be replaced by either Ronald Zubar or Tyrone Mears.

The news doesn’t seem too reassuring for captain Lorik Cana either as our Albanian fighter left his teammates at half -time and nothing has been said yet as to what might be wrong with him these days.

And at the end of the match, a very sad and worrying thing happened as Mamadou Niang rushed the stands to exchange a few words with supporters who were booing him the whole game, despite his great showing and the fact that he was just coming back from injury.
He even threw the armband (he received it when Cana left the pitch) on the floor, which forced Eric Gerets to immediately pick it up and ask his staff to go and try calm the player.

Here are the goals from last night: