Jean Louis Théodore Géricault, "The raft of the Medusa", (cc) wiki commons.

France finished its World Cup ambitions. This fact, and especially the way it happened, was received – especially by my countrymen – with happiness and derision. But as a Francophile, I couldn’t do this. Indeed, this provoked me to want to restore dignity to the national team of the country which will host me in September, especially since there was criticism and mockery from all sides (Equipe.fr said, “This World cup will be remembered for two things: the championship team and the absurdity of the French.”)

Here, I’ve chosen to immortalize the unfortunate misadventure of the French in South Africa as the “Raft of the Medusa.” Ok, the comparison with what seems like a soap opera to something so grotesque may be offensive to some like Géricault, but the matter is much deeper even. It shares with the medusa a panting of anguish. Anguish that divides a group of players and pals and suffers until the mutual betrayal; that may have put the nation in an embarrassing situation, combining an incredible mess with absurd daily plot twists that no one has been able to stop in time before they come one after the other, those poor guys are now in the dark and in private, from the pressure to enable a minimum of clarity.

Perhaps the confusion has something to do with the delicate phenomenon of the banlieux. But it may also be that, this confusion, customary in many other locker rooms, has this time left the locker room, through a kind of fratricidal crack, becoming an unpleasant novelty. It would be the first real time that the balance has been lost in the melting pot of diverse ethnicities that is Les Bleus, and which had until now proven successful – so much so to become a model of multi-ethnic coexistence.

For this reason, I say that the matter must be seen more deeply than simply “the ridiculous”. It will be addressed, I hope, with equal depth, at home. Whereas, as the players were returning home there was an unhealthy situation  and the team was under media attack, and even Zidane weighed in.

On the raft. There is destroyed, stranded by the ineptitude of its captain, Domenech. Everything is broken on the raft, the tables, civility and solidarities giving way to natural instincts. The survivors fight amongst themselves, and now it’s become survival of the fittest. The Captain Evra waves the letter to the journalists, the press release on behalf of all the players in which the mutiny is announced, a training strike. Further behind, those players faithful to him, try to do the same thing, waving and promising the whole story of what happened “aboard the ship”, the reckoning. They do not seem to understand, because water from the sea has entered their heads, but no one seems to care. And there are those in front, in confusion.

Their skin and nostrils burn from the salt. Perhaps who suffers most is Gourcuff, marginalized in the dark, under the mast, with his hands in his hair and terror in his eyes. He feels a victim of Ribery. He is the traitor, to the survivors. I don’t know if he was thinking about Anelka, who made off, killed, who is a corpse, left in the bottom of the raft, the legs in the icy water with his head upwards, proud.

There is only one man who does not participate in the collective unrest; he’s also in the bottom of the raft. It is the captain, the mutinied Domenech, with a blank look, for those who do not care anymore. Insomuch as to go in the center of the field, alone, before the final game. He does not want to stay in the locker room, and go to stake the center. They do not care about the tsunami that is ready to drown them. They don’t care because between the limbs of the body of the team, there is his daughter. Dead because of his boasting and he superstition. Dead not because it was a team of all Frenchmen, but rather because it was his.

This blog translated from Italian by Angela Boskovitch.