If football can bring great satisfaction, it can also be a source of frustration and complicated periods.
There is one who experienced a slump but who managed to bounce back in Morocco, with the U23 team which brought him great joy in recent years. Laurent Deraedt won the U23 CAN there before obtaining a bronze medal at the Paris Olympic Games last summer.
“It disrupted my plans”
But it is now in Charleroi that he officiates, he who replaced Cédric Berthelin as goalkeeper coach. “I never thought I would find myself on the Sporting bench last Friday because my intentions were to extend to Morocco,” he explains to Sudinfo.
“I had been in discussions for a long month. Then came this phone call on January 8, which disrupted my plans a little,” adds the man who joined Rik De Mil’s staff.
-“My oxygen buoy”
Deraedt, who won with Morocco but his time with the Atlas Lions brought him much more than that: “Morocco was my breathing space after my departure from Anderlecht due to the dismissal of Felice Mazzù. “
“Overnight it was over at Anderlecht. When you work in a club, you arrive at the stadium at 8 a.m. and you leave at 6 p.m. You hardly have time to raise your head, you are with your nose in the handlebars, you have lots of things to prepare, the matches come one after the other, it’s football, football, football… then from one day to the next, you have nothing left without an intermediate step to land smoothly. he explains.
And Deraedt explains how he reacted to his departure from Sporting: “At that moment, you have two options: either sit in your chair, eat chips and popcorn and watch Netflix… and that’s it. “It’s not the best solution; either you prepare for the future and stay in shape physically. I went to the gym, I went for a run, I prepared for a future challenge.”
