Barthez, the terrible announcement

As Bernard Lama recounts in a documentary, the promotion of Fabien Barthez as the starting goalkeeper for the French team before the 1998 World Cup caused a great deal of unease in the locker room.

If Eyes in the Blues by Stéphane Meunier marked an entire era, the journey of the French team during its victory at the 1998 World Cup, organized in France, is also recounted in a documentary entitled The Epic of the Blues. The Instagram account Generation France 98 regularly publishes sequences of this report with Didier Deschamps, Zinédine Zidane and others. The decision of the coach Aimé Jacquet to promote Fabien Barthez as number 1 goalkeeper at the expense of Bernard Lama, a few weeks before the World Cup, had been a shock for the media, the supporters and especially those concerned.

“It was hard to take when I was told.”recalls Lama, who recounts the first exchange he had with Barthez after Jacquet’s decision: “After training, we both found ourselves alone in the locker room, Fabien was in the shower, I went into the shower, I said: ‘Fabien, did the coach talk to you?’ He told me ‘yes’, ‘well know that I’m here if you need me, there’s no problem’.

Barthez-Lama duel before the World Cup

Bernard Lama was the star goalkeeper for PSG, the 1994 French champion and winner of the Cup Winners’ Cup in 1996. He was therefore a starter for Les Bleus at Euro 96, before experiencing a real nightmare. Injured in the knee and suspended for two months for cannabis use, Lama gave up his place to Barthez during the Tournoi de France in 1997 (the future “Divin chauve” conceding this legendary free kick from Roberto Carlos). Discarded at PSG, Lama found a way out in December 1997 to join West Ham and finally make Jacquet’s 22. The Lama-Barthez rivalry then delighted the French sports press in the run-up to the World Cup…

But the Guyanese quickly accepted his fate to become Barthez’s sparring partner alongside number 3, Lionel Charbonnier. “I’m here to win, that required me not to be on the field. There’s no question to ask when it’s like that, that’s also sport, the champion is not always the first and who wins all the time, that’s not what being a champion is, the champion is the one who has accepted the elements of life, accepted to get hurt, to suffer to reach a level, accepted not to play, because it’s the general interest that counts above all, that’s what team sport is about.”. A wonderful life lesson.