It is hard to argue against the suggestion that France have the best squad in international football. <\/p>\n
You might therefore think managing such an elite group of players is an easy task – but this is not necessarily true.<\/p>\n
For evidence, look at the number of occasions when clubs have crumbled under the wealth of talent signed or the challenge of managing the personalities of superstars.<\/p>\n
Since taking the France job in 2012, Didier Deschamps has continually reinvented his sides and got the most from France’s huge pool of talent.<\/p>\n
Even more impressively, he has earned a reputation for doing so mid-tournament – tweaking his system game by game to land on formulas that win the World Cup or come very close to doing so.<\/p>\n
This familiar pattern seems to be emerging in this World Cup too. <\/p>\n
Deschamps has been especially adept at maximising his top attacking talent and appears to have prioritised getting the most from Kylian Mbappe.<\/p>\n
Mbappe, now 27, prefers to be involved in the game rather than just being a last-line runner to finish off moves – as he did so brilliantly as a 19-year-old in France’s 2018 win.<\/p>\n
Fitting him in as a number nine while making the rest of the team tick is Deschamps’ big challenge at this World Cup. <\/p>\n
In qualifying, Deschamps had built a logical, if unusual, system. On paper, it was a lopsided 4-2-4 or a 4-2-3-1. <\/p>\n
Hugo Ekitike played on the left, with Mbappe dropping deep and pulling wide, close to the Liverpool forward. Ekitike, from the wing, or Dembele – from a more standard number 10 position – could both move into centre-forward positions. Michael Olise played on the right wing.<\/p>\n
In the opening game of this World Cup against Senegal, Deschamps set France up in a similar manner, with Desire Doue coming in for the injured Ekitike.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It is hard to argue against the suggestion that France have the best squad in international football. You…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":666071,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[218,101,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-666070","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-football","tag-football","tag-sports","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/666070","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=666070"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/666070\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/666071"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=666070"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=666070"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=666070"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}