Marseille Must Break a Nantes Hex to Keep Their Season Breathing
Second visits fourth on Saturday with nine points and eleven games between them, and the visitors have not won this fixture in six attempts.
“Another Nantes week, another Nantes hour.” The old refrain will be humming around the Canebière by Saturday evening unless Marseille find something they have mislaid for six straight meetings: a way past a side that treats them like a toll booth.
Olympique de Marseille sit fourth, a respectable 41 points from 23 games, but the table flatters them. They have lost eight times, shipped four at Lille, three at Lens and three at home to Sochaux a fortnight ago, and their expected points place them ninth. The 4-4-2 that Mads Bech Sørensen has stuck with through thick and thin averages 1.68 points a game, yet against a 5-2-3 DM Wide – precisely the shape Nantes will bring – Marseille’s record collapses to one win, no draws and two defeats, a clear-cut chance every 135 minutes. It is the match-up that turns their season into a shrug.
FC Nantes arrive as the league’s quiet overachievers. Second on 50 points, a point behind Lyon, they have conceded eight goals all season from an expected 14.4, and their 5-2-3 DM Wide has won 21 of 32 games. Abdallah Falah, the left winger who decided the reverse fixture in September with a 76th-minute strike, carries averages of 7.72 across his last five, though he is running at 66 per cent condition. Eduardo Teixeira, the defensive midfielder with three goals and two assists in seventeen league games, is even more spent at 62 per cent. Nantes travel with tired legs and a full trophy cabinet, and they will not care about either.
The old-boy subplot writes itself. Ali Dali spent four seasons at Nantes, though he never made a league appearance there, and now leads Marseille’s line alongside Bruno Diana. Dali is at 65 per cent condition and has not scored in five, but the fixture stirs something in players who once wore the yellow. The duel that may settle it is on Marseille’s right, where Louis Tourenne’s dribbling meets Andrei Coman’s pace and tackling; Coman has the legs, Tourenne the trickery, and the wing-back edges the footrace by six points of acceleration.
Marseille have won their last league game, 3-2 at Monaco in October’s glow, but the defeats keep coming. The last time these clubs met at the Stade de Marseille, in September 2062, Nantes left with a 2-0 win. Six meetings, six defeats since. Some hexes are earned; this one has been built, brick by brick, by a side that simply does not lose to Marseille.
Nantes need a win to keep pace with Lyon at the summit; Marseille need one to keep the chasing pack at arm’s length, with Sochaux and Paris Saint-Germain only three points behind and the head-to-head run against them. Saturday is not a title decider, but for the hosts it is a credibility test. Fail it, and the Canebière’s patience will be the shortest thing in the stadium.