This Wednesday February 9, OM will once again travel to Nice. A little more than five months after the match which counted for the third day of the championship and which was interrupted after throwing projectiles from Nice supporters who ended up invading the lawn. The match was replayed on neutral ground, in Troyes, at the end of October (1-1).
While Marseille supporters are again banned from traveling for this meeting, Jean-Pierre Rivère, the president of Nice, is trying to demine the atmosphere. He confided in Philippe Carayon in an interview broadcast on Canal+ where he returns for the first time to his totally lunar outing on match night, which you can find on video. However, by doing Rivère, explaining for example that he comes out of his reserve because the journalist insists, not because he had prepared this communication stunt a few days before the match …
“I don’t see the point of talking about it again. Afterwards, you want us to talk about it, we talk about it, but I think we have to come back to football. At no time could we imagine that he was going to this scenario to happen. And it may be the beginning of a mistake. Then, the evening drags on and I am asked to go to a press conference. I do not at all want to go there, I have no hindsight on the events. But I go there, because as a manager of a company, we solve our problems internally, but externally, there is only one responsible and in this case, it’s me. So I do it, very clumsily, but I do it. Afterwards, the next day, you summon everyone and you try to understand what really happened. And there I realize that we had failures, that we could have managed things differently. And I see images that I had not seen. There, everything collapses. 48 hours after these events, I swear to you that I wonder whether I stay or not in football. I can’t recognize myself in that. Afterwards, when the ship sinks, we don’t jump”.
