One phone call, then a very long silence
Senegal did ring Herve Renard this summer. Then they stopped answering.
The Ivory Coast head coach put the story on record this afternoon on Canal+ Sport Afrique, confirming that the Senegalese federation approached him before disappearing off his radar entirely.
“Yes, I got a call. But between the call and the waiting, it was a bit long, I’d say,” the Frenchman said. Nothing concrete arrived afterwards. No offer, no explanation. “Maybe they had a more important option for them. So they changed their minds. They didn’t let me know.”
That option turned out to be Patrick Vieira, who now runs the Lions of Teranga. Dakar picked its man without ever calling back the coach it had contacted first.
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Back where he won his second AFCON
Renard did not sit around waiting for the phone. Ivory Coast came in, and he took it.
The logic is easy to follow. The Elephants are the side he steered to the 2015 Africa Cup of Nations, a second continental crown to go with the one he won with Zambia three years earlier.
“I kept moving, I answered the people who contacted me and, more to the point, they were somewhere I wanted to go: Ivory Coast,” he said. His first squad list since coming back landed this week, and it contained a handful of names nobody expected.
How the AFCON coaching market really works
Renard had no appetite for dragging it out. “We close the curtain, move on and wish everyone good luck,” he said, and that was that.
The episode still says something about how business gets done on the African international circuit before an AFCON. Federations sound out several candidates at once, keep them all warm, then decide late. Whoever loses out usually reads about it online. Renard had somewhere else to go, which is more than most rejected candidates can say.
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