carmeldevil
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- May 15, 2018
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His face stares back from one of the soaring glass towers on the Corniche. He has already led his country to one triumphant World Cup and today, a few miles north of that giant image on Doha’s waterfront, Hugo Lloris will attempt to do something that was beyond Pele, Diego Maradona and anybody else you care to name from football’s top table.
And, yes, that can be slightly perplexing when many people, particularly in England, can still seem a bit undecided about Lloris’s status in the modern game and whether or not he qualifies for greatness.
“Is Hugo underrated?” Fabien Barthez, France’s 1998 World Cup-winning goalkeeper, asked recently. “A little bit, no doubt, and it annoys me to say so. But I should also tell you: the people who really understand football, the real connoisseurs of the sport, and those who understand the position of goalkeeper in particular, have a clear opinion about him. He is recognised by his peers. We see his true value. (Manuel) Neuer, (Thibaut) Courtois, Alisson (Becker), Lloris: they are all good. It is difficult to establish a hierarchy. But in my eyes, Hugo is among the best in the world.”
If you are a follower of the France team, you are probably inclined to agree. Lloris has already created a piece of history in this World Cup by winning his 143rd cap and overtaking Lilian Thuram, on 142, as France’s record appearance-maker.
Didier Deschamps, the France national team manager, marked the occasion by presenting his goalkeeper with a shirt bearing the number 143. The other players applauded. Lloris smiled politely, held up his new possession for a couple of photographs, and thanked everyone without feeling the need for any grand speeches.
Some players would have put in place a carefully prepared PR strategy to maximise exposure for such an achievement. Not Lloris, though. His friends explain that he turned down every media request because he did not want to make it about himself or seem overly presumptuous.
Now, though, there are bigger ambitions on the horizon for a goalkeeper who is about to make a record 20th appearance in the World Cup (taking the record off Manuel Neuer) and, in the process, maybe change the way the sport views him.
No man in history has captained a team successfully in two World Cup finals. Maradona tried with Argentina in 1986 and 1990 but won only the first. Dunga had a go, in 1994 and 1998, but Brazil did the same. Karl-Heinz Rummenigge lost both his finals with West Germany.
So, is it time that football, as a whole, re-assessed Lloris’s position if France can beat Argentina and the trophy is lifted by a goalkeeper who turns 36 on December 26 and maybe does not get the acclaim his career deserves?
“I was amazed when I heard people in the UK talking about Lloris as a ‘weak link’ before the England-France game,” says Matt Spiro, a French football expert and author of Sacre Bleu, telling the story of France’s national team over the last two decades. “In France, he is very much considered a strong link. He has been for more than a decade and is proving his class again. He is already France’s most-capped goalkeeper and if he wins a second final he will probably go down as the country’s greatest ever.”
Lloris was so instrumental to France’s semi-final win over Morocco he was picked out for special acclaim by Emmanuel Macron when the French president congratulated the team for their victory. In the previous game, Lloris made six saves to deny England and, although it is never an exact science, maybe it was his sheer presence that got into Harry Kane’s head before his Tottenham team-mate took, and missed, his second penalty of the match.
Still, though, it is fair to say that, even in France, Lloris is not viewed with the same reverence that Italy’s fans once had for Gianluigi Buffon, or Spain’s with Iker Casillas, or Germany’s with Neuer.
Perhaps he has suffered a little, profile-wise, from the fact Spurs are not always in the Champions League and therefore he does not get the same media exposure as, say, Neuer, Courtois, Alisson, Ederson and various others who have become part of the furniture in Europe’s premier club competition.
There is also something valid in what Barthez says about the general role of the goalkeeper and the way, almost always, attacking players attract the attention. In France’s case, for example, most of the petal-scattering tends to be at the feet of Kylian Mbappe or, previously, Karim Benzema.
“You’ll never change the mentality, this urban legend that goalkeepers are second-class players,” Barthez, speaking to Le Parisien, said earlier this month. “For the football industry, the goalkeeper is not in charge of the show. The decisive goalscorer brings the crowd to its feet — not the goalkeeper, even after a decisive save.
“Yet a great team must have a talented finisher at one end and a talented goalkeeper at the other. Since the beginning of our sport, we (goalkeepers) have always been a little bit at the bottom of the pile. We have seen this again in the awarding of the Ballon d’Or. Neuer, in particular, and Courtois could have been eligible in recent years.”
Realistically, though, can Lloris be included in that bracket? Has he genuinely been at the same level?
That is not meant to sound disrespectful when Lloris has captained France an astonishing 120 times, more than twice the nearest two players behind him: Deschamps with 54 and Michel Platini on 50.
Yet regular Tottenham watchers will also testify there have been some difficult spells for Lloris, when a number of accident-prone performances have undermined periods of solid, sometimes excellent form. He has never been voted into the Professional Footballers’ Association team of the year. He has never won Tottenham’s player of the year award during a decade in London. None of this has ever really felt controversial.
“I believe his level dipped in the aftermath of the 2018 World Cup — which was actually the case with several members of that France team — and he hasn’t quite been able to deliver the same consistency at club level,“ says Spiro. ”He has certainly made too many mistakes at Spurs, especially with the ball at his feet. But he has also won the team a lot of matches.
“What makes him special, and perhaps goes unnoticed, is his explosiveness when reacting or coming off his line. He showed that early on against England when Kane got clear on the right side of the box. The speed and power Lloris displayed to race off his line was sensational goalkeeping. Yet few mentioned that in the post-match analysis.”
Mauricio Pochettino’s view, as a former Spurs manager and one of The Athletic’s World Cup columnists, is that Lloris has been “without doubt” one of the best goalkeepers in the industry over the past five to seven years.
When Lloris returned from Russia 2018 he gave Pochettino his replica World Cup trophy and it was put on display in the manager’s office. Pochettino talks about the “amazing time” he spent with Lloris, as well as the “ups and downs” his goalkeeper went through. “We know very well how he suffered in his career, working so hard. Sometimes it was so unfair when they criticised him. To culminate with him winning the World Cup, it shows that all the people who trusted in him, we were right.”
Not that everything was straightforward. Relations were briefly strained in 2015 when Lloris fractured his wrist on holiday in Ibiza and, to Pochettino’s annoyance, kept it quiet for a week. That fallout, however, ended up bringing them closer together. Manager and captain had a bond, spending hours talking about football and life. It was embracing Lloris after the Champions League semi-final against Ajax in 2019 that brought Pochettino to tears.
As for the “ups and downs”, that brings in the drink-drive case from August 2018 when Lloris was stopped behind the wheel of his Porsche in Marylebone while more than twice over the legal limit.
Lloris had been in a restaurant with friends when, according to the evidence heard in court, he started accepting drinks from other diners and “by 2am he was completely drunk”. A taxi did not turn up, so Lloris decided to drive home, so drunk that he vomited inside his car and went through a red light. He was fined £50,000 ($60,800) and banned from driving for 20 months after pleading guilty in court. Spurs chose not to discipline him and some of his team-mates, The Athletic has been told, thought that was setting the wrong example.
“On July 15, he was arguably the proudest man on the planet (having won the World Cup),” David Sonn, Lloris’ solicitor, told the court. “Just 40 days later, he was arrested. He experienced the indignity of being handcuffed and put in a police station overnight. The spectacular fall from grace is not lost on Mr Lloris.”
The details remain shocking because it goes against everything we thought we knew about Lloris: thoughtful, intelligent and described in the French media as “Saint Lloris” because of the way he tends to lead by example.
Lloris comes from Cimiez, a wealthy neighbourhood of Nice, where he signed up to the junior system of his local club, OGC Nice, but not as a boarder because his parents wanted him to concentrate on school grades. His other love was tennis and the people who know him say it is no coincidence his hero was Pete Sampras: the quiet champion, driven, single-minded, ticking off Grand Slams (14 in total) without being too showy about it.
Lloris’s bond with his father, Luc, is said to have grown stronger after the death of his mother, Marie, a lawyer, in 2008 through cancer. Father and son text each other every day. And maybe it is because of his upbringing, as the son of a Monaco-based banker, that Lloris feels capable of negotiating his own contracts with Daniel Levy, the chairman of Spurs.
Ever since Nice attempted to sell the young Lloris to Lens without asking for his permission, he has had the strength of personality to stand up for himself and make sure he can handle whatever the industry throws at him. Lloris was 21 when his mother died. Two days later, he turned out for Nice in a league match, declining the offer of compassionate leave.
“Hugo has always shown a certain maturity and independence in his choices,” Luc said in an interview with France Football last month. “The quality of Hugo that has always amazed me is that, when there is a problem, he addresses it. He picks up his phone and he fixes it. He never buries his head in the sand.”
Might this be Lloris’s last World Cup? “Be careful (to assume that),“ his father added. ”Hugo had one of his best seasons last year. He has played sick before, injured. For him, the pain is mental. And he is tough.“
All of which makes it easier to understand why he was the youngest goalkeeper to captain France, at the age of 23, and has worn the armband for Les Bleus at six major tournaments.
“Lloris doesn’t talk much in the dressing room,” says Spiro. “In the 2018 World Cup, Paul Pogba delivered most of the motivational speeches. This time around, Raphael Varane and Antoine Griezmann have been the most vocal. But Lloris commands huge respect. The fact he does not raise his voice often means that, on the occasions he does, the players really listen.“
A small thing, perhaps, but it is interesting that Lloris is not mentioned once in Patrice Evra’s autobiography when it comes to the now-infamous events at the 2010 World Cup and the French players’ rebellion against manager Raymond Domenech.
That was Lloris’s first major tournament with France and, for the most part, he kept out of the politics. Lloris preferred to stay quiet, observe and learn.
With Spurs, it will sometimes be Kane who delivers the final team talk in a pre-match huddle in the dressing room. Some people outside the club might even forget it is Lloris, not Kane, who is captain. A perception has grown that the Frenchman is not a typical leader. But the people who have managed Lloris say that is unfair.
“He is the opposite,” says Claude Puel, who coached Lloris at Lyon from 2008 to 2011. “He has a big character and a lot of personality. You don’t have a career like his otherwise. But off the field, he is a private family man. He does not give away too much of himself.”
Don’t forget either that, before Deschamps, it was Laurent Blanc who made Lloris the France captain and, as well as Pochettino, three other Spurs managers — Jose Mourinho, Nuno Espirito Santo and Antonio Conte — have seen him in that role.
Olivier Giroud remembers the time for France when he was being booed by their own supporters. It was the same time that Benzema was not being considered for the national team and L’Equipe, the French sports daily, published a front page showing Giroud’s face and the headline: “Olivier Giroud, Le Mal-Aime” (the unloved one).
Giroud tried not to show he was hurt but, deep down, it bothered him. The players knew that, too. Lloris used to make light of it by singing an old Claude Francois song called Le Mal-Aime. Others joined in: Christophe Jallet, Benoit Costil, Laurent Koscielny. It was Lloris’s way of telling Giroud: don’t let it bother you, we all appreciate you.
And maybe Lloris knows himself what it feels like to be a little under-appreciated. In 2018, when France beat Croatia in the World Cup final, it was the Belgian Courtois who won FIFA’s award as the tournament’s outstanding goalkeeper. OK, Lloris made a bad mistake in the final, with France leading 4-1, to give away a late goal. It tends to be forgotten, however, that he made a string of impressive saves against Peru, Uruguay and Belgium to help France get that far.
Does it bother him that the closest he has ever been to the Ballon d’Or was 23rd position in 2019? Or that the individual awards have passed him by since being named Ligue 1’s goalkeeper of the year in 2009, 2010 and 2012? Lloris has answered that before. “There are many great actors who have not had an Oscar in their life,” he said. “It does not bother me at all.”
To Lloris, it has never been about profile or self-promotion. It is about achievement and leaving a mark on football history. There is plenty to like about that approach and, if the World Cup final ends with him lifting the trophy again, the simple fact is that his story will be in the record books forever.
And, yes, that can be slightly perplexing when many people, particularly in England, can still seem a bit undecided about Lloris’s status in the modern game and whether or not he qualifies for greatness.
“Is Hugo underrated?” Fabien Barthez, France’s 1998 World Cup-winning goalkeeper, asked recently. “A little bit, no doubt, and it annoys me to say so. But I should also tell you: the people who really understand football, the real connoisseurs of the sport, and those who understand the position of goalkeeper in particular, have a clear opinion about him. He is recognised by his peers. We see his true value. (Manuel) Neuer, (Thibaut) Courtois, Alisson (Becker), Lloris: they are all good. It is difficult to establish a hierarchy. But in my eyes, Hugo is among the best in the world.”
If you are a follower of the France team, you are probably inclined to agree. Lloris has already created a piece of history in this World Cup by winning his 143rd cap and overtaking Lilian Thuram, on 142, as France’s record appearance-maker.
Didier Deschamps, the France national team manager, marked the occasion by presenting his goalkeeper with a shirt bearing the number 143. The other players applauded. Lloris smiled politely, held up his new possession for a couple of photographs, and thanked everyone without feeling the need for any grand speeches.
Some players would have put in place a carefully prepared PR strategy to maximise exposure for such an achievement. Not Lloris, though. His friends explain that he turned down every media request because he did not want to make it about himself or seem overly presumptuous.
Now, though, there are bigger ambitions on the horizon for a goalkeeper who is about to make a record 20th appearance in the World Cup (taking the record off Manuel Neuer) and, in the process, maybe change the way the sport views him.
No man in history has captained a team successfully in two World Cup finals. Maradona tried with Argentina in 1986 and 1990 but won only the first. Dunga had a go, in 1994 and 1998, but Brazil did the same. Karl-Heinz Rummenigge lost both his finals with West Germany.
So, is it time that football, as a whole, re-assessed Lloris’s position if France can beat Argentina and the trophy is lifted by a goalkeeper who turns 36 on December 26 and maybe does not get the acclaim his career deserves?
“I was amazed when I heard people in the UK talking about Lloris as a ‘weak link’ before the England-France game,” says Matt Spiro, a French football expert and author of Sacre Bleu, telling the story of France’s national team over the last two decades. “In France, he is very much considered a strong link. He has been for more than a decade and is proving his class again. He is already France’s most-capped goalkeeper and if he wins a second final he will probably go down as the country’s greatest ever.”
Lloris was so instrumental to France’s semi-final win over Morocco he was picked out for special acclaim by Emmanuel Macron when the French president congratulated the team for their victory. In the previous game, Lloris made six saves to deny England and, although it is never an exact science, maybe it was his sheer presence that got into Harry Kane’s head before his Tottenham team-mate took, and missed, his second penalty of the match.
Still, though, it is fair to say that, even in France, Lloris is not viewed with the same reverence that Italy’s fans once had for Gianluigi Buffon, or Spain’s with Iker Casillas, or Germany’s with Neuer.
Perhaps he has suffered a little, profile-wise, from the fact Spurs are not always in the Champions League and therefore he does not get the same media exposure as, say, Neuer, Courtois, Alisson, Ederson and various others who have become part of the furniture in Europe’s premier club competition.
There is also something valid in what Barthez says about the general role of the goalkeeper and the way, almost always, attacking players attract the attention. In France’s case, for example, most of the petal-scattering tends to be at the feet of Kylian Mbappe or, previously, Karim Benzema.
“You’ll never change the mentality, this urban legend that goalkeepers are second-class players,” Barthez, speaking to Le Parisien, said earlier this month. “For the football industry, the goalkeeper is not in charge of the show. The decisive goalscorer brings the crowd to its feet — not the goalkeeper, even after a decisive save.
“Yet a great team must have a talented finisher at one end and a talented goalkeeper at the other. Since the beginning of our sport, we (goalkeepers) have always been a little bit at the bottom of the pile. We have seen this again in the awarding of the Ballon d’Or. Neuer, in particular, and Courtois could have been eligible in recent years.”
Realistically, though, can Lloris be included in that bracket? Has he genuinely been at the same level?
That is not meant to sound disrespectful when Lloris has captained France an astonishing 120 times, more than twice the nearest two players behind him: Deschamps with 54 and Michel Platini on 50.
Yet regular Tottenham watchers will also testify there have been some difficult spells for Lloris, when a number of accident-prone performances have undermined periods of solid, sometimes excellent form. He has never been voted into the Professional Footballers’ Association team of the year. He has never won Tottenham’s player of the year award during a decade in London. None of this has ever really felt controversial.
“I believe his level dipped in the aftermath of the 2018 World Cup — which was actually the case with several members of that France team — and he hasn’t quite been able to deliver the same consistency at club level,“ says Spiro. ”He has certainly made too many mistakes at Spurs, especially with the ball at his feet. But he has also won the team a lot of matches.
“What makes him special, and perhaps goes unnoticed, is his explosiveness when reacting or coming off his line. He showed that early on against England when Kane got clear on the right side of the box. The speed and power Lloris displayed to race off his line was sensational goalkeeping. Yet few mentioned that in the post-match analysis.”
Mauricio Pochettino’s view, as a former Spurs manager and one of The Athletic’s World Cup columnists, is that Lloris has been “without doubt” one of the best goalkeepers in the industry over the past five to seven years.
When Lloris returned from Russia 2018 he gave Pochettino his replica World Cup trophy and it was put on display in the manager’s office. Pochettino talks about the “amazing time” he spent with Lloris, as well as the “ups and downs” his goalkeeper went through. “We know very well how he suffered in his career, working so hard. Sometimes it was so unfair when they criticised him. To culminate with him winning the World Cup, it shows that all the people who trusted in him, we were right.”
Not that everything was straightforward. Relations were briefly strained in 2015 when Lloris fractured his wrist on holiday in Ibiza and, to Pochettino’s annoyance, kept it quiet for a week. That fallout, however, ended up bringing them closer together. Manager and captain had a bond, spending hours talking about football and life. It was embracing Lloris after the Champions League semi-final against Ajax in 2019 that brought Pochettino to tears.
As for the “ups and downs”, that brings in the drink-drive case from August 2018 when Lloris was stopped behind the wheel of his Porsche in Marylebone while more than twice over the legal limit.
Lloris had been in a restaurant with friends when, according to the evidence heard in court, he started accepting drinks from other diners and “by 2am he was completely drunk”. A taxi did not turn up, so Lloris decided to drive home, so drunk that he vomited inside his car and went through a red light. He was fined £50,000 ($60,800) and banned from driving for 20 months after pleading guilty in court. Spurs chose not to discipline him and some of his team-mates, The Athletic has been told, thought that was setting the wrong example.
“On July 15, he was arguably the proudest man on the planet (having won the World Cup),” David Sonn, Lloris’ solicitor, told the court. “Just 40 days later, he was arrested. He experienced the indignity of being handcuffed and put in a police station overnight. The spectacular fall from grace is not lost on Mr Lloris.”
The details remain shocking because it goes against everything we thought we knew about Lloris: thoughtful, intelligent and described in the French media as “Saint Lloris” because of the way he tends to lead by example.
Lloris comes from Cimiez, a wealthy neighbourhood of Nice, where he signed up to the junior system of his local club, OGC Nice, but not as a boarder because his parents wanted him to concentrate on school grades. His other love was tennis and the people who know him say it is no coincidence his hero was Pete Sampras: the quiet champion, driven, single-minded, ticking off Grand Slams (14 in total) without being too showy about it.
Lloris’s bond with his father, Luc, is said to have grown stronger after the death of his mother, Marie, a lawyer, in 2008 through cancer. Father and son text each other every day. And maybe it is because of his upbringing, as the son of a Monaco-based banker, that Lloris feels capable of negotiating his own contracts with Daniel Levy, the chairman of Spurs.
Ever since Nice attempted to sell the young Lloris to Lens without asking for his permission, he has had the strength of personality to stand up for himself and make sure he can handle whatever the industry throws at him. Lloris was 21 when his mother died. Two days later, he turned out for Nice in a league match, declining the offer of compassionate leave.
“Hugo has always shown a certain maturity and independence in his choices,” Luc said in an interview with France Football last month. “The quality of Hugo that has always amazed me is that, when there is a problem, he addresses it. He picks up his phone and he fixes it. He never buries his head in the sand.”
Might this be Lloris’s last World Cup? “Be careful (to assume that),“ his father added. ”Hugo had one of his best seasons last year. He has played sick before, injured. For him, the pain is mental. And he is tough.“
All of which makes it easier to understand why he was the youngest goalkeeper to captain France, at the age of 23, and has worn the armband for Les Bleus at six major tournaments.
“Lloris doesn’t talk much in the dressing room,” says Spiro. “In the 2018 World Cup, Paul Pogba delivered most of the motivational speeches. This time around, Raphael Varane and Antoine Griezmann have been the most vocal. But Lloris commands huge respect. The fact he does not raise his voice often means that, on the occasions he does, the players really listen.“
A small thing, perhaps, but it is interesting that Lloris is not mentioned once in Patrice Evra’s autobiography when it comes to the now-infamous events at the 2010 World Cup and the French players’ rebellion against manager Raymond Domenech.
That was Lloris’s first major tournament with France and, for the most part, he kept out of the politics. Lloris preferred to stay quiet, observe and learn.
With Spurs, it will sometimes be Kane who delivers the final team talk in a pre-match huddle in the dressing room. Some people outside the club might even forget it is Lloris, not Kane, who is captain. A perception has grown that the Frenchman is not a typical leader. But the people who have managed Lloris say that is unfair.
“He is the opposite,” says Claude Puel, who coached Lloris at Lyon from 2008 to 2011. “He has a big character and a lot of personality. You don’t have a career like his otherwise. But off the field, he is a private family man. He does not give away too much of himself.”
Don’t forget either that, before Deschamps, it was Laurent Blanc who made Lloris the France captain and, as well as Pochettino, three other Spurs managers — Jose Mourinho, Nuno Espirito Santo and Antonio Conte — have seen him in that role.
Olivier Giroud remembers the time for France when he was being booed by their own supporters. It was the same time that Benzema was not being considered for the national team and L’Equipe, the French sports daily, published a front page showing Giroud’s face and the headline: “Olivier Giroud, Le Mal-Aime” (the unloved one).
Giroud tried not to show he was hurt but, deep down, it bothered him. The players knew that, too. Lloris used to make light of it by singing an old Claude Francois song called Le Mal-Aime. Others joined in: Christophe Jallet, Benoit Costil, Laurent Koscielny. It was Lloris’s way of telling Giroud: don’t let it bother you, we all appreciate you.
And maybe Lloris knows himself what it feels like to be a little under-appreciated. In 2018, when France beat Croatia in the World Cup final, it was the Belgian Courtois who won FIFA’s award as the tournament’s outstanding goalkeeper. OK, Lloris made a bad mistake in the final, with France leading 4-1, to give away a late goal. It tends to be forgotten, however, that he made a string of impressive saves against Peru, Uruguay and Belgium to help France get that far.
Does it bother him that the closest he has ever been to the Ballon d’Or was 23rd position in 2019? Or that the individual awards have passed him by since being named Ligue 1’s goalkeeper of the year in 2009, 2010 and 2012? Lloris has answered that before. “There are many great actors who have not had an Oscar in their life,” he said. “It does not bother me at all.”
To Lloris, it has never been about profile or self-promotion. It is about achievement and leaving a mark on football history. There is plenty to like about that approach and, if the World Cup final ends with him lifting the trophy again, the simple fact is that his story will be in the record books forever.
