As everyone knows, you can never get the French to agree on anything. So it has been nice to see the country coming together during this World Cup.
As my friend, a graduate student in Paris, put it to me, “Domenech is the most hated man in France. Even more so than Le Pen.” Domenech is of course the coach of the French national team, while Jean-Marie Le Pen is the leader of the extremist Front National party, who said in 2008 that the German occupation of France had been “not particularly inhumane.”
I must have looked confused. “There are at least some people who like Le Pen,” he explained. “No one likes Domenech.”
Great! Nobody likes Anelka either, or Ribery, or the cold summer weather here, or the luxury hotel the team is staying at in South Africa, or losing. So, the World Cup is defying stereotypes all around. Agreement at last.
It isn’t all fun and games in France, though. Some people seem to be having a difficult month.
Take Domenech, for example. In 2006, star player Zinedine Zidane drove his head into an opposing player’s chest in the finals of the World Cup because he felt disrespected by something (no one knows exactly what) and might well have cost Domenech’s team the championship. It’s only been downhill for the coach since then.
Like that time in the press conference after France’s first-round exit from the 2008 EuroCup when a giddy Domenech proposed to his then-girlfriend in front of a horrified French audience. Or that practice on Sunday, when no players showed up.
But things might even be looking up for the curly-haired coach himself. Since ineffective striker Nicolas Anelka called Domenech a dirty son of a whore at halftime of the Mexico match, it has been Anelka v. Domenech nonstop. And because to be against both is nihilism, Domenech is bound to pick up some fans. Like Le Pen, remember?
Domenech does have some personal appeal, too. Ok, not much. But consider the fact that he is not Frank Ribery, the declining (and married) midfielder under investigation for having relations with an underage prostitute named Zahia. Or Patrice Evra, the French captain who organized the team’s boycott of Sunday practice and now seems obsessed with, as he said Saturday, “eliminating” the “traitor” he believes to be on the team.
Sometimes, to be weak is better than to be hypocritical. If this is true, then Domenech’s star continues to rise. Because he is certainly not Rama Yade, the young French sports minister who criticized the team’s luxury accomodations and then stayed in an even more expensive hotel when she visited South Africa. See, Domenech, you’re coming back.
Understandably, the fans and the media in France are incensed. Sponsors are fleeing.
Even the political classes have expressed their “distress,” from French President Nicolas Sarkozy (who took time out from a cozy visit with Russian President Dmitri Medvedev, at which he received as a gift a document signed by Napoleon, to call Anelka’s insults “inacceptable”) on down. Really, nothing infuriates like missing the political boost World Cup success brings. Or being reminded that Napoleon was taller than you.
Regular people are just as upset. In fact, nothing in America can compare to the ire of French fans right now. L’Equipe, the major sports newspaper, used its front page the morning after the Mexico game to encourage fans to “chuckle before [the players’s] puffy blisters so poorly situated under their hairy leather when they would be more useful just below their belts.” Something, I know, has been lost in translation here. But still, it’s bad.
In one way or another, the French team has become a symbol of everything that is wrong in the world. Given everything that is wrong in the world, this is no mean feat.
So it’s not just about the results, one loss and one tie. It’s about the money, the decadence,
the fame of the players, how commercialized the sport is, how it’s not just a game anymore, the whole damn thing. Screw it.
As a response, people are watching the TV, reading the papers, browsing the blogs, listening to the radio rail against soccer culture. Because that will take the money out of it, see?
Yes, as there is in so much moral outrage, there’s an element of self-hate in this World Cup drama. Even the soccer writers, so blisteringly polemical about the team, have taken to calling Domenech weak-willed when he changes strategy to accomodate their critiques.
And that’s what makes this episode so unifying. Everyone has a part in the disgust. Everyone, for once, is Domenech.
