AA/Alger/Aksil Ouali
French President Emmanuel Macron called, this Friday, from Algeria where he is on a three-day visit, young Algerians and Africans to banish “anti-France sentiment”. “Your future is not anti-France,” he said, accusing those he called “new imperialists” of being behind this campaign directed once morest his country, in particular in Africa where anti-French movements have emerged in recent months.
Emmanuel Macron denounced, in the process, “the immense manipulation of remotely controlled social networks by foreign powers”, aiming without mentioning Russia, China and Türkiye.
In addition, the French president said he was in favor of the organization of a new friendly match between the Algerian national football team and its French counterpart.
“It would be a beautiful thing to ward off the past,” replied Emmanuel Macron to a question of whether he was in favor of the course of such a confrontation. And the French president added: “Culture and sport are fields where we must be together. Sometimes, we can confront each other but in a friendly way”.
As a reminder, the last confrontation between the Greens of Algeria and the Blues of France dates back to October 2001. At the time, the French team, world champion and holder of the European Cup, faced in Paris at the Stade de France, the comrades of Djamel Belmadi, current coach of the Fennecs of Algeria. But the match did not go to an end due to an invasion of the field by Algerian fans, while the score was 4 to 1 for the France team.
The idea of organizing a second friendly match was launched in September 2019 by national coach Djamel Belmadi.
Since then, the possibility of organizing this game has been mentioned several times by the president of the French Football Federation (FFF) Noël Le Graët. But no date has been set. “I have been with the Federation for eight years, I have always wanted to go to Algiers. We never managed to reach an agreement, ”said the boss of the FFF in September 2020.
The same Noël Le Graët returned to the charge by questioning politics as the main obstacle for the progress of this match between Algeria and France. “I always want to do it, but it’s politics that prevents me from doing it,” he said in June 2021.
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