Lens wants to secure the Champions League and bring the party home

The finish line is there, straight ahead, within reach of crampons. Since the players in our Championship are used to saying that Ligue 1 is a marathon, we will say that the Lensois have traveled 42 kilometers and it would be as incredible as a fool for them to stumble during the last 195 meters. The Artésiens are 5 points ahead of OM with two games remaining and they have a huge opportunity on Saturday evening

to validate their fantastic season with a 2nd place which would send them directly to the Champions League in a few months. Huge because in this sold-out Bollaert for the 26th time in a row, Franck Haise’s players, on top of their sixteen successes in eighteen games, have statistics worthy of Manchester City(17 wins in 19 home games)

. Immense because facing them stands a team already relegated, which took only 8 points in the return phase and scored only two goals in their last eleven matches. So immense that the now general manager spent twenty minutes tempering any beginning of euphoria or enthusiasm, Thursday, in his pre-match press conference.

Ajaccio, Lens’ pet peeve in Ligue 1 ” Not long ago (Monday), Le Havre, which everyone saw going up before their match against Valenciennes,lost 2-0 at home. Ajaccio won at Marseille in the first leg(2-1, October 8) . It’s part of football. Everything is always possible. »

To go (a little) in its direction, we will add that the Corsicans had held Seko Fofana’s band in check last summer (0-0) and that Lens only won 18% of its matches against the ACA in L1, its worst ratio among the teams faced at least ten times. But I promise, now we’re done with the party poopers and to be honest, we still have a hard time imagining Olivier Pantaloni’s players spoiling a party that promises to be memorable in the artesian enclosure under the blows of 23 hours.“The risk would be to take this team lightly nuance the Narbonnais Swiss army knife Florian Sotoca, who could play piston in the absence of Przemyslaw Frankowski, suspended. The most important thing is to respect them. » And to avoid a start like in the last two matches, where “individual errors”

(Haise) had cost the opener. Against Reims (2-1) as in Lorient (3-1), the dolphin got away with it but it sucks. In Brittany, Fofana also affirmed that there was “a lot of mental and physical fatigue” and on Thursday, Sotoca confirmed ambivalent feelings:

“It’s mentally exhausting, since we’re not used to playing at a high level, you always have to win the game that’s coming. But we don’t want it to end either because we know that this season is extraordinary and that we won’t experience one like that every year. »

Openda targets 20 goals

A season which can make it possible to find Europe with big ears after more than twenty years of abstinence, it is indeed quite unusual. As unusual as a Lille coach who believes that his Lensois colleague deserves the title of coach of the year, as was the case with Paulo Fonseca on Friday. This is undoubtedly a good leg for Franck Haise but it gives a fair idea of ​​the major work carried out by his team, which will exceed the bar of 80 points if successful.