Le Guen Blames Attitude and Himself

June 14th, 2010 | by: shane | View Comments

Paul Le Guen has blamed the attitude of his players for the costly defeat against Japan today in Cameroon’s World Cup opener. Le Guen believes the team had the wrong attitude on the pitch, “We were tense and nervous, especially in the first half. We did not show what we are capable of. We were not at our level and kept losing possession.”

Actually Cameroon were at their level and showed exactly what they are capable of, which is nothing. At least when they are deployed like that. How Le Guen can claim they were not at their level when the last good match they played was against Morocco in the last game of World Cup qualification is interesting news to me. I believe Cameroon have won precisely one match since qualifying unless there was a friendly that I am forgetting. And that one win was against Zambia in the Nations Cup, a match that they were extremely lucky to win benefitting from a keeper error that got Cameroon back in the game. The level Cameroon were at today has been the level they have been at for the entirety of 2010. That Le Guen cannot comprehend that shows how delusional he has become.

And if Le Guen feels the players were tense and nervous maybe he should realize that they felt that way because they play for a manager who constantly changes the side. There has been no continuity within the Cameroon line up since the Nations Cup. Le Guen is constantly trying out new players in various positions as well as different formations even experimenting with a 3-4-3 in the last friendly against Serbia. Hardly the time to try a new formation. The players may have been less tense and nervous if they were confident of their spot in the line up. Seeing three established starters such as Carlos Kameni, Alexandre Song and Achille Emana relegated to the bench for no real reason at all could hardly have made some of the players comfortable in their role in the team. Hopefully Le Guen sticks with his policy of changing up the team for the next match though as obviously this team chosen today will never pay dividends as I anticipated in the preview.

In addition to blaming the attitude of the players on the pitch Le Guen to his credit took responsibility for wasting Samuel Eto’o by playing him on the right wing. Of course a manager with any kind of acumen would have never deployed Eto’o in that position in the first place. “I chose the position for him and I take responsibility for that. You make the choice with what you have, and I wanted to do the best, but it didn’t work.” On the contrary Paul, if you wanted to do the best you would not have a fielded a starting 11 and formation that never had any chance of scoring.

Going forward in this World Cup Le Guen had this to say, “We have to win against Denmark, we know that, we will try to recover well to do our best.” It is going to take a spectacular recovery for Cameroon salvage the pride that the Indomitable Lions once had. I hope Le Guen has the capacity to oversee this resucitation but frankly I think he has no such ability. I think once Cameroon complete a World Cup of three defeats for the second time in their history Le Guen will never show his face in Cameroon again and nor should he.

If you think I am being too harsh on Le Guen let me know but personally I think he has demonstrated beyond all doubt that he is out of his league here. He did great in his first 4 games in charge as Cameroon won for successive matches to rescue World Cup qualification. Since then the only positive thing he has achieved is to get Joël Matip, Gaëtan Bong and Maxim Choupo-Moting to represent Cameroon as they are players who could pay dividends in the future. Besides that he has been a total failure since the victory of Morocco that brought Cameroon to South Africa.