Stade Rennais – Toulouse: Jorge Sampaoli, head of a monumental project
While his formalization is expected during the day, Jorge Sampaoli should become the new site manager of a team in ruins, at all levels. The challenge is immense.
Within two months, Stade Rennes players will be able to discover the new infrastructure at Piverdière, a long-standing project finally coming to an end. But the first beneficiaries of this “Piv' 2”, who are also the first to return while the other employees of the club will still have to wait, have until then also a project to finish: to make the current field of ruins something something a little more presentable.
We thought we had seen the worst from Stade Rennes in a very long time at Auxerre (0-4) a week ago, but the Rouge et Noir surprised everyone by delivering an apocalyptic performance against Toulouse (0-2) at home. In front of a Roazhon Park which whistled them from the first goal (14th), before a second (22nd) having definitively recorded the fall of SRFC, the Rennais plunged so deeply into nothingness that not much could come of it.
Once again, this squad showed worrying limits in the technical aspect, in the desire to come together as one. “Sick”, the term was used by Amine Gouiri after the match, and this team is seriously ill. Interim Sébastien Tambouret did not hide his astonishment to see a team far from the one he had briefly led two sessions before leading it for this very strange meeting. How can you go from day to night in just a few meters separating the Piverdière field and Roazhon Park?
What can Sampaoli do?
We felt all the astonishment and dejection of Ludovic Blas, who had once again come to assume his responsibilities in the mixed zone, a place where he has never appeared this season, let's admit that. Stade Rennes is a wounded beast, staring into space, powerless and fallen. In the middle of this football parody, Jorge Sampaoli experienced his premiere yesterday in the stands of Roazhon Park. Arriving two minutes before kick-off, the Argentinian witnessed the bad spectacle of what should become his team at the start of the week. But what will he be able to do with it?
If his arrival can still raise certain questions about the marriage between two very different identities, “El Pelado” embodies the boost this team needs, or any other action that could initiate an awakening, before this SRFC slips definitely towards the bottom of the rankings and an even more trying season.
We will already have to think about the next transfer window, as the casting errors seem numerous in the copy submitted this summer by Frederic Massara. Henrik Meister and Jordan James not even on the match sheet, two recruits (Kamara, Jota) only at kick-off, cataclysmic performances from executives or “former” members of the club (Assignon, Truffert, Santamaria, Kalimuendo in particular), the doubt is now very present as to the ability of this team to do something this season.
But before thinking about the winter window, for Sampaoli it is a matter of finding the instructions for this vast project. The bodily attitudes, the exits from the stadium with their heads bowed, the public whistling more than applauding, the RCK symbolically leaving the stadium in the 86th minute, it is a field of ruins that Jorge Sampaoli is tackling.
