“A wounded team”
Bruno Genesio has no interest in feeling sorry for Lens, at least not on the pitch. Marseille travel to Bollaert on Sunday (8:45pm local) to close out matchday 10, and their coach spent his Saturday press conference warning that the hosts will come out swinging after Wednesday’s 9-1 Champions League defeat by Como.
“It’s a wounded team we’re going to face,” Genesio said. “But we know Lens’s values. We expect a reaction from them. We’ll have to be ready from the first minute.” He added that some games go entirely the opponent’s way while nothing works for your own side, so Marseille should not dwell on what happened to Lens in midweek.
Sympathy was still part of the conversation. “You always feel empathy for the coach, I know what you can feel in those moments,” Genesio admitted, and he has reason to know.
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Genesio’s own rough start
The Marseille manager lost six of his first eight official games in charge, including a 4-1 defeat at Besiktas, which left him with one of the worst opening records of any new Marseille coach in 50 years. Things have turned since the international break. Marseille have won four league games in a row, and the performance at Leverkusen, Genesio said, showed movement and rotations that were missing in August and September.
He refused to get carried away. “Certainties are dangerous in football,” he said. “We question ourselves every three days. Humility lets us play the kind of game we played at Leverkusen and keeps us measured, one way or the other.”
What awaits at Bollaert
Lens will be playing in front of a crowd that has had four days to stew over the Como result, in a stadium where the mood in the Pas-de-Calais is reportedly tense. Marseille are the form side in Ligue 1 right now, but a home team with a point to prove is a different proposition from the one they would have met a week earlier.
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