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There is a match this Thursday, November 13 at the Stade de France, where the French football team can qualify for the 2026 World Cup in North America if it beats Ukraine. In France, the meeting was controversial, not because of the opponent and the political situation, but because of the date. November 13 is the anniversary of the terrorist attacks in Paris in 2015. Particularly adept at saying nothing at a press conference, the Blues coach Didier Deschamps for once expressed a clear, personal opinion and, even more surprisingly, likely to fuel the debate: “It’s a special day and I don’t feel the strength to talk about what happened, but deep down inside me, if we could have avoided playing this match November 13 would have been good.”
The Blues will play, as they played on November 13, 2015, in a friendly against Germany. We have forgotten it a little because the project largely failed, but the Stade de France was one of the three targets of the terrorists, with the terraces of the 10th and 11th arrondissements and the Bataclan. Three attackers blew themselves up near the stadium, unable to enter, killing a passerby and injuring around ten people. After the match, which was not interrupted so as not to add to the panic, the players from both teams remained secluded in the locker room for a long time. On the French side, Antoine Griezmann was slow to hear from his sister, who was at the Bataclan concert, while Lassana Diarra learned of the death of her cousin, shot dead in her car on rue Bichat. The German players shared the locker room with two police officers who explained to them how their weapons worked, in case they themselves had to be shot…
