Luis Enrique, PSG coach, has the right to be unpleasant and to spare us banalities of tactics for dummies – Libération

“I have no intention of explaining my tactics, because you wouldn’t understand them.” A few minutes after the defeat of Paris-SG on the lawn of Arsenal (0-2) Tuesday October 1, the Spanish coach of the reigning French champions, Luis Enrique, sent a colleague from Canal +, who had previously expressed on “rigidity» et «the absence of function overflow» from the Parisian tactical framework during this London evening.

Since then, Luis Enrique has been picking up on social media. And the corporation of journalists is not left out, pointing out the relative contempt in which the former coach of the Spanish selection holds it. It is true that a media is never more than an intermediary between the general public and the players in the game. And that Canal + pays dearly (480 million euros per season) for the rights to broadcast the matches of the Ligue des champions, as well as the few words released by the coach just after the final whistle, while the reporters from the written press waited three hours for this same coach to address them. Luis Enrique is not exactly a pleasant interlocutor towards journalists (men and women, which helps to rule out suspicions of sexism linked to Tuesday evening’s sequence), it’s true, our Spanish colleagues had warned us. It is also his right.

A coach who does not speak is first and foremost a coach who does not lie

Like cutting short the carnival – we weigh the words – which follows matches at this level, the elements of language delivered by the meter, the pseudo-tactical considerations for dummies (“The idea was to have the ball,” without messing around?) or ready-made sentences (“We are disappointed to have lost”, “We returned to the field in the second half with better intentions”, “We put the ingredients”…) that the written press journalists repeat themselves during the three aforementioned periods to laugh and wait while waiting for the players or the coach to arrive. This is the Euclid postulate of football at these altitudes: a coach who does not speak is first and foremost a coach who does not lie.

And Luis Enrique puts everyone at the same price, unlike some of his colleagues (starting with one of his predecessors at Paris-SG) who buy a little influence in the media by letting go of certain things off the record. to selected interlocutors. On Tuesday evening, he played his role to the fullest: by alienating everyone in one sentence, he partly overshadowed his team’s mediocre match at Arsenal and that’s the kind of decoy that coaches master perfectly. The day before, he had also held the same transparent line by dropping a small bombshell at a press conference: “I’m not here [au Paris-SG] to win the Champions League, but to build a team. And endorse a policy without stars (therefore without very big players) drawn up by the Qatari owners of the club, of whom he is only ever the zealous employee. Luis Enrique can still sometimes send the whole world to hell, he deserves to be listened to more than many others.