Matchday 23: Cissé Is Definitely Back! Coupet Is Not!

By: Sam | January 28th, 2008

Sometimes things just go your way, don’t they? Ask a Marseille fan, and they won’t really know what to tell you. OM have had their fair share of bad luck so far this season, with injuries, bad breaks and questionable refereeing, but the gods must have pitied them last weekend, enough for the Vélodrome to witness the wildest ninety minutes of action it’s seen in a couple of years. To the chagrin of the not-capacity crowd in Marseille, Julien Toudic opened the scoring after roughly one hundred seconds of play. A handful of minutes later, he scored another… kind of. Though he was offside at the start of the play, he was allowed to take the ball and shoot the ball into the net just before Steve Mandanda cleared it out beautifully. The ball was in the net by about a yard, but no sir. On top of that, ten minutes later, Djibril Cissé scored his first of the match in eerily similar fashion, only this time the ball was barely over the line, but it counted, tie game. The rest is history. Remember Mathieu Valbuena, the midget who scored against Liverpool at Anfield way back when? Well, he only does it a few times a year, apparently, but man, does he do it well. Five minutes before half-time, you know what he does? He takes the ball, from thirty yards out at a forty-five degree angle from the net, and he just wallops that ball so oddly, and it looks like it’s going a mile wide, but it curls like a boomerang and somehow lodges itself in the top-left of Benoit Costil’s net. Can you say “Goal of the week by a long shot” ? And three minutes later, he does it again. This time, it’s more of a lob, but it’s a frickin’ beauty, and Marseille are three-one up at the half. Two Cissé goals and a Nasri goal later, the match is over, 6-1 final. With their goal differential all better and three points in their pocket, OM are now in eighth place, the highest they’ve been so far this season. Caen, let’s remember, had that bullet start to the season and are still sitting mighty pretty at spot number six, two points up from Marseille.

Elsewhere, the Derby du Rhône pitting Lyon and Saint-Étienne had its moments as well. With Jérémie Janot out with a shoulder injury and Pascal Feindouno squeaking into the knockout round of the African Cup of Nations with Guinea, manager Laurent Roussey was without perhaps his two best players. Alain Perrin lined up newcomer Marc Crosas in his five-man midfield behind lone striker Karim Benzema. With Le Chaudron bubbling, les Verts proved the mightier side in the first half, with Dernis hitting the post five minutes from time and in injury time, Grégory Coupet made an ass of himself by squirting a missed clearance right onto the dreadlocks of Batéfimbi Gomis, who greedily knocked the ball past the stunned keeper. In the second half, a few chances were scattered here and there, while the notorious Fred made his entry on the pitch in Crosas’ stead, and even scored a goal, albeit offside. But it all came down to injury time again, when, when the match seemed in the bag for the home crowd (it would’ve been their first win in seventeen matches against their hated rivals), none other than the wunderkind Karim Benzema, who scored his fifteenth in league play this year, quite unlike most of his goals, by deftly whipping a free-kick over the wall and past a helpless Jody Viviani for the equalizer. That goal, coupled with Bordeaux’s no-show at Lorient (see below), puts Lyon four points clear at the top. ASSE, on the other hand, are still treading water at the unlucky thirteenth spot.

As for the closest contenders to Lyon’s crown, suffice to say Bordeaux didn’t show why they were so close to the top this weekend. First of all, Lolo Blanc decided to sit Micoud, Cavenaghi and Alonso to start the match. Bordeaux never really got a hold of the rhythm, and eventually, it was a Christophe Jallet penalty on 77 minutes that did the trick for les Merlus. Bordeaux are four points adrift of Lyon and four points ahead of Nancy, in third. Lorient are in the middle of the club sandwich (OH MY GOD WHAT A PUN I TOTALLY R00L) in the top-middle, where they’re in seventh place with 33 points.

I gotta say though: Besides those three matches, not much of note happened score-wise. Lens and Strasbourg drew 2-2 in a match marred by (you guessed it) a horrendous refereeing decision, which disallowed a perfectly good Toifilou Maoulida goal at the death for an “offside” position. PSG and Lille bored each other’s shorts off with a 0-0 draw, which doesn’t help either side a whole lot. Third-place Nancy couldn’t get anything past Auxerre on the road, where the final was also 0-0. Lowly Metz salvaged a point off Rennes with a late goal, levelling the score at 1-1. Same score between Toulouse and Nice. In what was possibly the biggest upset of the weekend, slacking Sochaux beat surprising Valenciennes 1-0 on a Bréchet goal.

What were your guyses views on this lovely matchday?