Lyon Looking For a Juventus Miracle As Pressure Mounts
Parc Olympique Lyonnais was built for nights like this. It was always club president Jean-Michel Aulas’ baby, envisaging a way for Lyon to grow internationally as well as domestically. On Tuesday night, it will host its biggest night since its January inauguration when Juventus roll into town.
The extent of Aulas’ obsession to get to this point has been clear for years, as OL alumnus Miralem Pjanic acknowledged while he got his first look at his old club’s impressive new pad. “Thanks to this new stadium, Lyon will improve,” the midfielder said at Juve’s pre-match press conference, per Football Italia. “The president has very clear ideas in that regard.”
Playing Juve is a significant moment. Lyon will see the serial Italian champions as a benchmark—not just on the pitch, but off it—as an example of a club that has made the most of a new facility, in terms of commerce plus sheer atmosphere and prestige.
During the protracted construction of Parc OL, which was subject to over 100 judicial challenges, Aulas talked repeatedly about wanting to ape the self-sufficient stadium-led financing model of Bayern Munich or Arsenal (including to News Tank in 2015, as recounted by Le Figaro, in French). Juve are an even more modern example.
There’s just one problem—what’s on the pitch. Not for the first time, the club’s supporters are asking themselves what the worth of having such an impressive stadium is if the club doesn’t have a team fit to grace it. For all the evident quality on the club’s playing staff, the sporting direction of OL is a growing cause for concern.
Friday’s defeat at leaders OGC Nice left a mark, not only for the fact it left Lyon 10 points from the summit and was their sixth reverse in 12 matches, but for its timing. The extra 24 hours afforded by moving the fixture for television for Champions League preparation is of limited value when your visitors are the all-conquering Juve, and especially when a chance to reflate your fragile confidence has been frittered away.
Lyon are eighth in Ligue 1, but of more relevance—given the mountainous task that faces them this week in the shape of Massimiliano Allegri’s team—they sit in third place in Group E, a point behind Sevilla, their chief rivals for (one would safely assume) the second qualification spot.
After spurning a series of presentable chances—a theme for Lyon's season so far—against the side that sit third in La Liga above Barcelona, in the pair’s first confrontation three weeks ago in Andalucia, Les Gones have to scrap to get what they can from back-to-back matches with Juve. In comparison, Jorge Sampaoli and company have successive games against Dinamo Zagreb, who are already nailed on for the group’s wooden spoon.
It has been a hard debut to Lyon’s season which doesn’t promise to get much easier in the immediate future. Few people will be so acutely aware of the pressure such a difficult start puts on the head coach than the current incumbent, Bruno Genesio. He was Hubert Fournier’s assistant this time last year as the young team bombed in their first Champions League group campaign in four years.
Having initially been given a mandate to the end of the season when Fournier was sacked on Christmas Eve, Genesio won the job permanently on the back of a stirring second half of the campaign.
A 6-1 demolition of fellow Champions League chasers AS Monaco in the season’s penultimate game completed an overhaul of the Principality side having started with a 10-point deficit. Unfortunately for Aulas and his lofty ambitions, maintaining the status quo has meant inertia, and the repetition of many of the same early-season mistakes as last year.
Genesio’s evident joy at making the most of his big chance at a club that he has served for so long seems to have quickly disappeared. There was something quite sad about his (justifiable) statement at his own pre-game press conference on Monday that “in top level football, the only pleasure is winning matches” (per the club’s official Twitter feed, below, in French).
The 50-year-old seems worn down by dealing with all the drama around the club, whether it’s finding a place for the marginalised Mathieu Valbuena (the club’s top earner) or being caught in the middle of a spat between presidential advisor Bernard Lacombe and the returned Gerard Houllier, the club’s new consultant.
Houllier broke his silence recently by granting an interview to Christophe Dugarry on RMC Sport, and at least took a step to undermining Genesio by confirming that he was in favour of signing free-agent striker Emmanuel Adebayor as cover, shortly after the coach declined to take him. “The only thing,” Houllier said, “is I thought we were a bit short of numbers. It’s experience that tells me that. It’s the coach who decides.”
Genesio has declined to get involved in a public discourse, which is sensible. He has plenty of other things on his plate.
Facing Juve, his side will have to show a vast defensive improvement on recent weeks. The 4-3-3 with which Lyon hunted down Monaco last season did its job but left them defensively vulnerable. After injuries to Alexandre Lacazette and Nabil Fekir—which at least partially back the thrust of Houllier’s point—the coach rejigged to 3-5-1-1, with mixed results.
After Fekir’s recent return from an arthroscopy, ironing out complications in his recovery from cruciate knee ligament surgery, he has looked far closer to the player who carried all before him in 2014-15 and beguiled France coach Didier Deschamps. The return to a front two has suited him much better than 4-3-3, as the player himself reiterated in an interview with Le Progres this week, as reported by L’Equipe.
Reunited with Lacazette, a player with whom Fekir enjoys an intuitive relationship and who returned from five weeks out with hamstring trouble against Nice as a substitute, there is at least the suggestion that Juve could have something to think about.
It will be the first time the pair have started a Champions League match together; they played a half alongside one another in the unsuccessful August 2013 playoff against Real Sociedad though they, and especially Fekir, were considerably more green back then.
The OL team that gave Juve a good examination over two legs in the 2014 Europa League quarter-final was significantly weaker than the current one, at least on paper, so perhaps it’s not a totally lost cause. That group contained a young Fekir, and a teenage Corentin Tolisso, who has gone on to become one of the team’s mainstays.
With the news that Maciej Rybus and Emanuel Mammana have dropped out through injury and illness respectively, Genesio might even be forced to revert to 4-4-2, which many would argue a full-strength Lyon should play anyway.
Others would suggest that after the unexpected success of the front three of Lacazette, Rachid Ghezzal and the currently injured Maxwel Cornet last season, it could be another instance of the coach finding the right recipe by default.
That, however, is several leaps forward from the present reality—which is that Lyon, and Genesio, face the might of Gonzalo Higuain, Paulo Dybala, Leonardo Bonucci and company with almost an obligation to get a result.
There will be little time to enjoy the essence of the elite football occasion that Aulas has waited so long to welcome to Parc OL.
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