On the eve of the first of many meetings with Manchester United, Didier Deschamps heard the sneer that would become famous. A reporter from Italy had travelled to Lancashire to interview Eric Cantona before a Juventus-United match in the Champions League. He left with a vivid metaphor. Juve’s Deschamps, Cantona told him, was a limited footballer, no more than a “water carrier”.
The quote would be repeated so often that Deschamps, now head coach of Marseilles, learnt to smile, even to cite it, usually with irony. By then, he had taken over Cantona’s old job as captain of the France national team. In that role, he would lift the World Cup and the European championship. A lot of water has passed under the bridge since Cantona’s caricature of the most successful skipper in his country’s history, so Deschamps could live quite happily with the jibe.
He used to provide some curt answers on the field, too. Deschamps’ Juventus beat Cantona’s United in Turin on the September 1996 day “water carrier” first appeared in print. They defeated them again at Old Trafford later that season, as, for the second of three successive years, Deschamps headed for the European Cup final. Then Cantona retired, leaving an imprint on international club competitions a lot paler than that of his compatriot: Deschamps the player won the Champions League twice, with Marseilles and with Juve. He reached the final a further three times, with Juve and then Valencia.
Almost every time the water carrier was there, some poor British team was splashed on the way. His Marseilles denied Rangers a place in the 1993 final. Juventus often met United in the Italian club’s pre-eminent period and, apart from the 1999 semi-final, Deschamps tended to finish on top. With Valencia, at the tail end of his career, Arsenal and Leeds were knocked out en route to a silver medal.
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After all this, Deschamps would be forgiven for holding English football in little regard. He does not, although his most direct experience of the Premier League was not particularly happy. “I found I preferred Latin football,” he said, looking back at the season he spent at Chelsea, whom he joined from Juventus in 1999.
Deschamps was 30 then and though his industrious, officious style might have seemed well suited to Premier League midfields, Chelsea came to regard him as a specialist for European nights. He won an FA Cup but had little chance to stand out as the leader he had been before. “He’s a guy who was born to be captain,” recalled Frank Leboeuf, a Chelsea colleague and compatriot, “and with France he had been the engine of a team, his will to win inspired players.”
To almost all his contemporaries, Deschamps the footballer seemed an obvious candidate for management. “He was so mature even at 15 years old,” said long-time teammate and friend Marcel Desailly. “Even as a boy starting out in the game, he was interested in talking about tactics. He has cultural interests beyond football but has chosen to dedicate himself to the sport. He’s intelligent and always knows just what to say. If you are around him you have the feeling you’re going to have all the information you need as a team. His understanding of relationships and his capacity to analyse situations means people trust him.”
Monaco were the first to put faith in his potential as a coach. At 33, he was younger than some of his players. Keeping an authoritative distance was a challenge: “I learnt what you can and cannot do on the practice ground.” He learnt fast. By the end of his second season Monaco had won the French League Cup and by the end of his third he had achieved something rare: he had taken a Ligue 1 team to a Champions League final — where they lost to Jose Mourinho’s Porto — for the first and only time since Marseilles’ single triumph. Moreover, Monaco had knocked out Real Madrid and defeated Chelsea in the semi-final.
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He later coached Juventus for one campaign, restoring them to Serie A, but the adventure ended in disagreements with directors over strategy.
There was a pause before his next job, at another of his former clubs. In his first season in charge of Marseilles, they won their first title for 18 years.
No wonder other, grander clubs want to hire him. Liverpool called last summer; somebody else with a bigger budget than Marseilles will do the same before next season. It is an inevitability that the club president, Jean-Claude Dassier, who has his head coach under contract until June 2012 (with a 2011 release clause if a suitor pays Marseilles nearly £3m) felt obliged to address on Friday. “Didier has a contract. He gets angry when players don’t respect theirs, so I can’t imagine for a second he wouldn’t honour his.”
Dassier was responding to a crisis that has made Deschamps angry with one player, the Brazilian striker Brandao, who was charged with sexually assaulting a young woman in a motorway lay-by. The player is on bail pending trial but missed Friday’s 2-0 win at Rennes, which put Marseilles a point behind league leaders Lille, and will not travel to Manchester.
Deschamps reminded Brandao: “Footballers are public figures and must be responsible in what they say and do.” That response would have been foreseen by the rest of the squad.
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“He’s a coach who encourages his players to assume responsibility,” says Edouard Cisse, the midfielder who also worked with him at Monaco. Cisse is a scuffler, a water carrier, if you like, though not of the high pedigree Deschamps showed as a player.
Few in the Marseilles team rank anywhere near that level, because, as their head coach points out, “the best French players tend to leave the French league”.
So do the best French coaches, which is what makes folk at Marseilles nervous about losing their prized asset.
