Nice 2-2 Bordeaux

By: Martha | October 27th, 2008

Where am I? Who are you people?

After the first 30 minutes or so of Saturday’s match, you’d never, ever have been able to convince me that Nice would get a point. Not a million years. As everyone who gave voice to the obvious after the match (Antonetti and Cyril #1 among them) said, they gave Bordeaux waaaaay too much respect, and almost paid for it with a home loss. Happily, though, Nice managed to realize they weren’t playing Barca and gradually woke up — I was watching on a dreadful stream, but even I could tell they put together some nice passing moves in the first half, and were nowhere near as inferior as they’d appeared early-on in the match.

The best part of the whole match for me was injury time. It wasn’t even a little bit pretty, and was highlighted (lowlighted?) by a profound lack of organization, a couple bad decisions, and a near-disaster from Ospina when he took a bad touch and gave the ball away to Gourcuff, but Nice were fighting like crazy, and you could see that, to a man, they believed they could get that second goal back. I don’t know if it was the fantastic support, or the massive stroke of luck in Mouloungui’s offside goal being allowed to stand, or what, but the belief was really, really great to see.

And, while the PK was wrongly given (ala that Lyon PK you may recall), Mouloungui was clever in looking for it when he played the ball into the defender’s body — I’m a huge Ben Saada supporter, but Mouloungui changed the game when he came on, just by being in the right place(s) at the right time(s).*

As Rool (who was old-man awesome) said after the match, it’s hard not to think of this result as balancing out what happened against Lyon. More importantly, though, it shown the team that they really can come back against almost anything. Getting a point after being down 0-2 with five minutes left probably won’t happen again for a long time, but the self-believe from Saturday will hopefully be around for a long while.

Now if they could just STOP GIVING UP PKs, FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, we might be in pretty good shape.

Also, regarding the baby keeper: He looked bad on the first goal (I still can’t figure out why it took him so long to get across, he had to have been unsighted) and with that hairy touch in extra time, but other than that he was impressive. Made a crazy, reaction save with his legs shortly after the first goal, and got off his line really well when he needed to, in order to close down a couple breaks. Ospina’s pair of encouraging performances aside, though, Football365 reported Saturday that Letizi will be back in goal on Wednesday, where he’ll stay until the winter break. We’ll see if that actually holds true or not.

And, finally, Apam’s extension has been confirmed by people who aren’t his agent. At best, it means he’s getting paid better and will be around forever. More realistically, it means he’s getting paid better, and has graciously put Nice in a position to get more for him when the inevitable sale comes.

*It’s worth pointing out the class with which Blanc has taken those two poor refereeing decisions at the end of the match. As Antonetti could tell him, that’s not easy to do when you’re in the right — full credit to Blanc.