“It’s hard to pull off Zidane’s first touch”
Dayot Upamecano came off the grass at Clairefontaine grinning on Monday. “We had fun, above all. Today was more about getting used to things, and welcoming the new lads too,” said the Bayern defender, before adding the sort of line you rarely hear from an international centre-back. “We were all fans of him when we were kids. It’s hard to pull off Zidane’s first touch.”
Zinedine Zidane had just taken his first session as France manager, with four Nations League fixtures waiting. Fourteen years of Didier Deschamps ended the moment the whistle went, and the difference showed up inside the opening minutes. Upamecano boiled the new man’s first message down to a single word: focus.
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Three rituals that did not survive the changeover
The arrival parade is gone. That slow procession of players filing into camp, a fixture of the build-up for supporters, has simply been dropped. Injured players no longer make the trip to Clairefontaine to have a problem assessed either, with the staff now dealing straight with the clubs, according to RMC Sport. Quieter than both: the squad trained on the Michel Platini pitch, a surface that sat more or less unused under the previous regime.
Small things, all of them, and together they say something. The camp is being pulled in tight around the grass and what happens on it. Less ceremony around the edges.
The Real Madrid act, now in blue
Reporters allowed in saw a coach with his hands on everything. Zidane laid out the cones himself, stepped into the drills, demonstrated a movement rather than describing it, and kept dropping technical notes between exercises.
None of which is new. At Real Madrid, where he took three straight Champions Leagues between 2016 and 2018, he would happily join the small-sided games at the end of a session. What he gets out of it here is the open question, because a national team manager has a squad in front of him for a handful of days a month and not much more.
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