Marseille 3-1 Zenit, we deserved more…

By: Magnusson | March 6th, 2008

Call me greedy, call me totally ridiculous but I really came out of this game with the feeling that Marseille should have scored way more than we did tonight. First of all let me say that this match was near perfection on our end for nearly 70 minutes. There wasn’t a moment where I felt like St.Petersburg could come and take this one away from us. I need to be congratulating everyone because we were playing beautifully from the get go.
What has me a little frustrated is that yes, we scored three goals at home but we could have (should have?) scored way more. Mamadou Niang touched the bar twice on two powerful headers, Djibril Cissé mimmicked him on a corner and on Benoit Cheyrou’s cross from a Zenden pass, I’m still wondering how it didn’t end up in the net. These are just the obvious choices where the russians were powerless and the gods just didn’t want us to score.

Marseille started the match with Djibril Cissé wearing the captain’s armband in Lorik Cana and Julien Rodriguez’s absence. This was the third time this season that “Satellite” (sidebar – I’m back to calling him that) wore it and boy was he proud! On the day of his son’s second anniversary, Djibril told everyone that this was always his dream as a kid, to “be like Jean-Pierre Papin“, to start at Marseille with the number 9, the armband and scoring like he did. He said this night was special to him on many levels, I bet.
At the second the game started, it was obvious that the Marseille faithful would witness one of those incredible nights that legends are made of. Every single player seemed to be totally focused on his goal and Marseille had half a dozen chances but only one was transformed into a goal. On a Taïwo cross from the midfield, Djibril Cissé kicked it as it came and scored beautifully at the exact moment when the public was still disappointed over Mamadou Niang’s consecutive headers. We didn’t even have some time to mope aroud that Djibril Cissé showed us why, in my mind, there’s no way he won’t be part of the French National Team this summer.

Jacques Faty left his teammates a lot earlier than expected when he felt injured again. You saw him practically crying minutes after being subbed for Ronald Zubar. Jacques definitly did not deserve to be injured agin and I hope it will turn out to be harmless.

After such an animated first half, you would’ve thought that marseille was going to slow things down a bit. Nah Son! As soon as they came back from the locker-room, our little guys started attacking again and it only took Mamadou Niang three minutes to score his goal (Any other day, I swear this would’ve meant a hat trick). Funny thing is, he touched a post for the third time, but this time it went in anyway. The ball came to him after Samir Nasri tried his luck and was countered by russian defenders, Mamad took his sweet time to bypass the whole defense and put it where Maalafeyev couldn’t touch it. Another world-calss goal.

The second goal didn’t stop anything as Marseille kept attacking and the third goal came soon enough on a perfect service by Samir Nasri once agin who gave his Captain a great pass, leaving Djibril Cissé alone with the keeper, in a situation where he rarely misses when he’s confident. He was confident.

This is when we started relaxing a bit, the 60th minute when Bolo Zenden came on to replace Mamadou Niang who felt a little pich in his thigh and didn’t want to take any risks, having so many games to play ahead of us. Plus at that moment, it seemed realistic to think that marseille was about to score at least two more goals. But the russians knew that the only thing their runner-ups of Spartak Moscow needed to qualify over us, despite our domination of both games, was that away goal that can change everything given how Marseille usually doesn’t fare too well in exotic locations such as Russia. The super-devilish Arshavin knew this and went through Ronald Zubar Fernando Torres style, giving hope to his whole side for next week. He eliminated us two years ago by scoring in the Vélodrome, let’s hope this only proves to be anecdotal.

After that goal, the attacking started again on our end but we didn’t manage to score that fourth goal.
Now I know what I said but it’s not like we did anything bad at all. I would have been super happy to sign for a 3-1 win before the match and marseille are warned anyway. They won’t be doing us like they and Dniepopetrovsk
did in the recent past. All we have to do is brave the cold once again and play like we mean it for 90 minutes. we can go through, let’s make that happen. There’s no way we gonna be taking two goals again in Russia like it happened in Moscow. In french we say “Un homme avertit en vaut deux” (I’m gonna ask Rami how to translate this, I’m pretty sure it’s “A man fore-warned is fore-armed”. If it’s not, I’ll edit this)
In the meantime, let’s focus back on the Ligue1 where we’ll be hosting Saint-Etienne this weekend for a clash of the two most beloved french clubs. I’ll settle for the same score as tonight’s.