Le Sommer fires France past Morocco to set up Australia quarter-final
Now might be a good time to start buying some shares in the French.
It was a bracingly chilly night on Australia’s south coast, and as France comfortably dispatched the World Cup’s last African representatives there was a devastating coldness to their movements, the poise and purpose of a team beginning to move through the gears at just the right time.
Their quarter-final against the hosts at Brisbane on Saturday morning promises to be one of the defining games of this tournament, a tantalising collision of Aussie guts and French guile, a gourmet feast of titanic battles: Sam Kerr against Wendie Renard, Caitlin Foord against Eve Perisset, Eugenie Le Sommer against whoever has the misfortune of trying to work out where Eugenie Le Sommer is going.
And in the indomitable Kadidiatou Diani the French have perhaps the outstanding centre-forward of the competition so far: a creative as well as a goalscoring threat, a player who in her pace and workrate and efficiency and understanding of space encapsulates this team at their best.
She scored the first goal and set up the next two. Le Sommer chipped in with two goals, and if Morocco could be proud of their progress to this point then there will also be a certain regret at the ease with which they allowed France through the door.
No alarms and no surprises, then, and precious little complacency either. Then again, in Hervé Renard they have a coach who knows more than most about the dangers of an unfancied African underdog.
Whether with Zambia at the men’s 2012 Africa Cup of Nations or taking Morocco’s men to the 2018 World Cup, Renard has done his best work when the odds are stacked against him.
And in a way perhaps something similar is happening here: melding and moulding a
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