On the eve of facing Olympique Lyonnais, Pascal Dupraz spoke of the expectation around this derby. The Saint-Etienne coach expects his team to show certain virtues.
20th in Ligue 1, Saint-Etienne goes to Décines on Friday to face OL (9 p.m.). Before this highly anticipated poster, the Stéphanois are not confident since they remain on 6 consecutive defeats in the league. Their opponent is not the best either with an 11th place, even if he beat Troyes last weekend.
Before this game, the coach of the Greens, Pascal Dupraz, therefore recalled what he expected from his group. “A derby is played and won. I don’t know if Lyon are in difficulty. It’s not my business. If it was enough to deliver messages for it to happen, I would deliver them all the time “Here, keeping up, it has to be a feat. I consider that we have a one in two chance of staying up. The statistics jostle all the time. Despite these first two defeats, moreover at home (0-1 ahead of Nantes and 1-2 against Lens), not everything is to be thrown away, he assured. I found the team in progress compared to the first game. Despite these small athletic stops. I do not take refuge behind the narrowness of the workforce. But still.”
“You have to be more impervious”
The Forézien coach said his squad was working no differently than in previous weeks. “There is always a lot of application, concentration and listening. I expect that we do not concede a goal from set pieces and that we make the right gestures and above all, that we deliver by causing problems for our opponent by weighing on the Lyon defense, detailed the technician. What suits me is that compared to Nantes, the benchmark because it was my first in Ligue 1 at the head of Saint-Etienne, we put the Lens team more at fault. Now we have to improve the chances-to-goals ratio and be more impermeable.”
For his first duel against OL on the ASSE bench, Dupraz said to himself “serene“. “I approach it with conviction. These are the ingredients you need. It’s the derby in France, the one you shouldn’t miss, he shouted. Since I was a kid, Saint-Etienne-Lyon has represented something. At one point, I thought of interfering with Evian-TG. But you can’t compete. What is unfortunate is that there will not be many spectators.”