En beating Saint-Pryvé Saint-Hilaire (2-0) on Saturday evening, the Girondins did not only maintain their accounting hopes of getting involved in the fight for the climb, returning to eleven points behind leader Saint-Malo with two matches late. They also delivered one of the most convincing copies of the season. Maybe even the best. Questioned on this subject, Bruno Irles oscillated between hesitation and refusal of a form of euphoria: “I… I think so. What do you think? »
There were certainly a particularly laborious first 30 minutes, with no opportunities to get their teeth into and “a bit of difficulty managing their torchbearers who were moving away a lot, so we were running into nothing”, analyzed Emeric Depussay. But Lassana Diabaté's save at the half-hour mark seemed to wake everyone up. Until the final whistle, we almost only saw the Bordelais on the pitch.
Several dangerous players
Teasing minds will point out that it was the least they could do, since their opponent last season had a total budget of 800,000 euros, less than the Girondins' current sporting payroll alone. But the field does not always reflect financial reality (the FCGB knows something about this) and clear progress was needed to dominate the second in the ranking, which presented at kick-off the best attack and the best defense in the group.
Bordeaux's game had often appeared quite poor and stereotypical until then, almost exclusively dependent on the performance of Andy Carroll. Saturday evening showed that Bruno Irles had other strings to his bow. “The offensive efforts were better. I had shaken up my offenses to get more runs, more calls. You have to be able to hurt deep, around and differently from Andy. They showed it. We were criticized for having only one dangerous player, but we saw that there were several. »
Paradox and promise
If Travis Mutyaba was inside, Soufiane Bahassa was very active, Amadou Diallo brought speed to his side, Yanis Merdji found the light with his double and Andy Carroll, beyond his involvement in the two goals, was very useful as a fixing point. In the middle, the absence of Adrien Louveau (suspended) was not felt. On the downside, the full-backs remained quite discreet overall, little served by the eccentrics in front of them.
This first victory by two goals of the season confirms that the Girondins prefer to prolong the suspense a little: they scored nine of their ten goals in the second half. It is both a paradox, for a team which has not experienced common physical preparation, and the promise of a good margin of progress. The success could have been greater with more success at the end of the game (two crossbars hit).
We will quickly know if the improvement is confirmed: from Wednesday, the Girondins will be back in competition, with a late first match to be played at Poiré-sur-Vie.
