Luis Enrique, PSG manager, has the right to be unpleasant and spare us banalities of dummies tactics – Libération

2024-10-02 11:02:12

The Spanish coach is being criticized on social networks for retorting to a Canal+ journalist that he had no intention of explaining his tactics during the capital club’s defeat to Arsenal on Tuesday evening.

“I’m not going to explain my tactics, because you wouldn’t understand them.” A few minutes after Paris-SG‘s defeat at Arsenal (0-2) on Tuesday 1 October, the Spanish coach of the reigning French champions, Luis Enrique, expelled a colleague from Canal +, who had previously expressed on “rigidity” And “the absence of function overflow» from the Parisian tactical framework during this London evening.

“I’m not going to explain my tactics to you, because you wouldn’t understand them” 🥶

Luis Enrique very annoyed and not very talkative after tonight’s defeat against Arsenal (2-0) 😶

Do you understand the Parisian coach’s reaction? #ARSPSPG | #UCL pic.twitter.com/BXQLyC08gF

— CANAL+ Foot (@CanalplusFoot) October 1, 2024

Since then, Luis Enrique has taken over social media. And the journalist corps is no different, underlining the relative contempt in which the former coach of the Spanish selection holds him. It is true that the media are never anything more than an intermediary between the general public and the players in the game and that Canal + pays dearly (480 million euros per season) for the retransmission rights of the Ligue des Champions matches. as well as the few words released by the coach immediately after the final whistle, while the journalists of the written press waited three hours for the coach himself to speak. Luis Enrique is not exactly a pleasant interlocutor towards journalists (men and women, which helps to exclude suspicions of sexism linked to Tuesday evening’s sequence), it’s true, our Spanish colleagues had warned us. It is also his right.

A coach who doesn’t speak is first and foremost a coach who doesn’t lie

How to cut short the carnival – let’s weigh the words – that follows the matches of this level, the elements of language delivered to the meter, the pseudo-tactical considerations for dummies (“The idea was to have the ball” without joking?) or ready-made sentences (“We are disappointed to have lost”, “We returned to the field in the second half with better intentions”, “We put the ingredients”…) that the journalists of the written press repeat themselves in the three aforementioned periods to laugh and wait waiting for the arrival of the players or the coach. This is the Euclidean postulate of football at these altitudes: a coach who doesn’t speak is first of all a coach who doesn’t lie.

And Luis Enrique puts everyone at the same price, unlike some of his colleagues (starting with one of his predecessors at Paris-SG) who buy a bit of media influence by letting certain things go unofficially to selected interlocutors. On Tuesday night he played his role to the fullest: alienating everyone in one sentence, he partly overshadowed his team’s mediocre game against Arsenal and is the kind of bait that managers master perfectly. Even the day before he had maintained the same transparent line, dropping a small bombshell in a press conference: “I’m not here [au Paris-SG] win the Champions League, but build a team. And support a policy without stars (therefore without very great players) developed by the Qatari owners of the club, of which he is always and only the zealous employee. Luis Enrique sometimes still manages to send the whole world to hell, he deserves to be listened to more than many others.