France international and Newcastle right-back appeared on RMC Sport today to talk to Luis Fernandez about the recent turnaround in form by l’Equipe de France:
In response to a poll carried out by RMC that said over 80% of the French population was unhappy with the French national team’s performances of late, Debuchy said the following:
‘We are never happy to see the results of such a poll. It is up to us to convince them otherwise. Things happened which really didn’t please people. They are not happy. We need to get the people back on our side. We have talked about this a bit as a group. We will do everything we can to qualify for the World Cup and hopefully win back the public.’
‘We have put ourselves in a good position in terms of form for these two very important matches. We have scored a lot and we did not concede. I think our confidence is back.’
The French Football Federation is currently in the process of lodging an official complaint with FIFA regarding the injustice of the World Cup Qualifying Playoff system. The French football body feels that their nation is at an unfair disadvantage because they played only 8 games in their qualifying group due to their only being 4 other European nations inside of it.
These matches are taken into account when UEFA’s complex coefficient ranking system is calculated and France have effectively 2 games of missed opportunity to gain points compared with the other 7 teams who await Monday’s draw.
SEEDED: Portugal, Greece, Croatia, Ukraine.
UNSEEDED: France, Sweden, Romania, Iceland.
Portuguese superstar Cristiano Ronaldo has indicated the side he would most like to avoid is Les Bleus and Didier Deschamps promptly returned the compliment: ‘If there is one side we would like to avoid it is Portugal. They look more in shape than the others.’
A poll conducted by the L’Equipe website last night indicated that the French public would most like to play Greece.
