The FCM has entrusted the reins to a very good former player, with long experience but who still has a lot to prove as a coach.
Mondercange still hasn’t won in DN and it’s October 4th. Sébastien Mazurier was dismissed, Marc Depienne took over as interim and, on Wednesday evening, the FCM ended up formalizing the name of the man who will take on this thorny challenge: Joris Di Gregorio, 42 years old. A hell of a comeback, totally unexpected.
The person concerned, for his very first interview as a DN coach (even if he was already assistant to Paulo Gomes at Mondorf, between July 2018 and April 2019) himself asked the question yesterday: “A great player does- he necessarily a great coach? Because it’s a very different profession.” We will not settle the question here, but it is clear that he was a great player on the scale of the Grand Duchy and that Stefano Bensi, a former teammate at Esch, who rushed into the same breach of Having to take over a group at short notice without having coaching experience, he did the job very well at Fola. Even though he has just resigned, he has maintained his position. And twice more.
“I never sold myself”
Di Gregorio, former center forward, falsely nonchalant, has been done with his playing career a little longer. At the time, he was guilty of 79 goals in 144 DN matches at F91, Fola and Mondorf. The Frenchman will perhaps never have been top scorer in the BGL Ligue, but he will have been the big boss of this championship between 2005 and 2008, a period during which he won everything with the F91, i.e. three championships, two Cups and two titles as best player, also scoring 3 goals in 8 European Cup matches. With a pedigree like that, it would have been so easy to find a position at the end of your playing contract. “But I never sold out. I thought I had some interesting touches and they didn’t come.”
A priori, this is not the karma that Mondercange wants to buy, which had already surveyed the terrain a year ago. But it was obviously not yet time. The red lantern has just returned to the charge in the face of the urgency of its accounting situation, hoping to reproduce the very good move made (maintaining without going through the dams) with Sébastien Mazurier, last season. It was already a delicate mission and entrusted to a boy who – like Bensi in Fola – had never held this kind of position before. This will not entirely be the case for Di Gregorio, who coached Veymerange, in French Regional 2, for two seasons. But he agrees to remain in a form of improvisation: “I discover absolutely everything. But for the players, it shouldn’t be easy either. It’s quite a learning experience. Fortunately, we have three weeks before the next DN match.
The next match, in fact, is Wiltz, another poorly ranked player that Mondercange would do well to defeat to finally take off. Yesterday, it was not yet time to talk about tactics or game philosophy. Di Gregorio spoke of pleasure and rigor: “I am passionate about the game who likes to participate in sessions. I want my players to respect football, the opponent, their club. And I am uncompromising about behavior. For the rest, we will move forward step by step. Sometimes football shifts to details.” Like a change of coach.
