During the group stages, the French team seemed without direction and cohesion and looked certain to have a poor tournament. After literally escaping to the knockout rounds they put in two remarkable performances against Spain and Brazil to reach the semi-fiinals.

Against Portugal, they were not the team we saw in the past two matches and will need to turn it around once again to defeat Italy.

Portugal were poor competition and the Azzuri will be far stronger at every position and the French will need to do more than defend for 90 minutes.

Midfielders Patrick Viera and Claude Makelele were effective against Portugal, but they only ventured forward for corners. Their plan was to stay directly in front of the back four and it worked, but it worked against a team that had literally no threat in the striker position. Pauleta was dire as a center forward and it is amazing that he is the best at that position in all of Portugal.

Italy have three strikers who are in a different class than Pauleta and will take advantage of any mistakes the French make.

France played more of a 4-2-3-1 formation than a 4-5-1 and Thierry Henry was isolated up front throughout the match and wingers Franck Ribery and Florent Malouda did not have the quality to make the perfect crosses that were needed. Even Zidane, often double-teamed, was often out of options and ideas when the 6 or 7 Portugese defenseman were marking just the four French attackers.

They will have to be better against a stronger Italian defense.

An alternative for France would be to play a 4-4-2 but with striker Louis Saha suspended, the options for coach Raymond Domanech are limited. Once again, Zidane and Viera (and Ribery and Malouda) will have to play the game of their lives, this time to lift the cup.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 6th, 2006 at 7:53 am and is filed under World Cup 2006. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. Both comments and pings are currently closed.