Anybody who has been paying attention over the last eight months to the sputtering reign of coach Raymond Domenech over the French national team would've expected the on-field performances that France have put forth.
Listless. Boring. Disjointed.
There's hardly a negative adjective you could reach for that wouldn't apply to this French team, a shadow of their 2006 selves.
In truth the French team, much like the Italian squad, is having difficulty moving beyond last generation's well-known group of stars.
Thierry Henry, France's all-time leading goalscorer, has hardly played this past season despite being healthy, only appearing as a substitute against Uruguay for the last 20 minutes. It was telling that when Nikolas Anelka told his coach to, in so many French nothings, go f--k himself, Henry was not the chosen replacement.
Instead he sat on the bench watching his team lose 2-0 to Mexico. Why Domenech would leave one of the most gifted French players of all time on the bench in a game where a single goal might have changed momentum might have well been the topic of discussion in the last two days, had Anelka not become the symbol for strife in the French camp.
Anelka has always invited controversy, though never to this level. Still, one can do a lot better than to simply blame all of France's woes on Anelka.
The problems with France reach back much further than that when the leaders of the French football federation simply didn't have the will to fire Domenech. With Zinedine Zidane taking his infamous exit in the 2006 final, Henry unable to get a game in Barcelona, Claude Makelele no longer in the national picture and William Gallas a risk from an injury standpoint, this World Cup campaign was always going to be about younger French stars emerging.
By keeping Domenech as coach of the squad France's team has been left straddled between two generations that seem to play completely different styles. Henry and Gallas are the oldest on the team, with both sharing their 33rd birthday this August 17--which would make them downright sprightly by Italian standards--and yet neither really provides the natural leadership that Zidane and Makelele did over the past decade.
France's poor showing at the 2008 European Championships was an unexpected roadblock for a group that had just made a World Cup final and had won both a European and World title in the previous 10 years.
That 2008 tournament might've been the cap to one of the finest generations of footballers any European nation had ever enjoyed. Instead it should've been the signal that the national team required new blood, new leadership and a new mentality that looked forward.
In the end it was neither.
We're now left with a France team that feels like a national embarrassment. The only unified effort they've shown at this tournament is deciding to not train for a coach they despise, a coach that would have been fired months ago if Henry hadn't used his arm to send France to a World Cup they never belonged in.
Conversely, the Italians seem to be on the opposite end of the continuum. A group of old, experienced hands that are just four years removed from a World Cup triumph, the Italians seem quite unified.
Unfortunately, they're a team that looks exactly the way one might expect: a group of 30-somethings that just finished a long club season and now has to go play at altitude in a South African winter because the Italian national coaches seem to think there's no young Italians with any talent.
As their 1-1 draw with New Zealand today showed, sometimes fresh legs make all the difference. This is a team playing with real spirit, but a team whose time has passed.
Despite their differences off the field, Italy and France are suffering from the same disease: an inability to put the past to bed and embrace the future, whatever may come. In football, it's never easy to tell former heroes that they're too old and it's even more difficult to forecast how a player will perform years down the line, but it's important for national teams to know when to say goodbye to certain players so that the young players can develop.
It's also not as simple as putting names on a teamsheet as, even in periods of transition, a national team coach's job is always dependent on results and thus always at risk.
A perfect example of the right way to do things is Brazil who have not only put the time of Ronaldo, Ronaldinho, Rivaldo and Romario behind them, but have driven forward with an entirely new brand of football that looks foreign in Brazilian colors.
Brazil's manager Dunga has made no secret, from the day he was hired, about his plans for this World Cup: embrace youth, bring in new blood to the national team and show the world a brand of Brazilian football that goes beyond fancy tricks; show the world a Brazil that is gritty, tough, that gets results.
From picking relatively unknown players to asking beloved but mercurial and out of form Ronaldinho to stay home, Dunga has had to make many courageous moves in his time as manager.
France, Italy, Brazil.
Winners of the past four World Cups.
And yet here, in 2010, it's those who have looked to the future who look most likely to emulate the recent past.
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