Daniel Riolo reacted this Monday in After Foot on RMC to the sanction taken by Luis Enrique against Ousmane Dembélé, excluded from the PSG group for the trip to Arsenal in the Champions League.
A lack of weight and an embarrassing affair for PSG. Luis Enrique has decided to do without Ousmane Dembélé when traveling to London to challenge Arsenal this Tuesday in the Champions League (9 p.m.). A situation which concerns Daniel Riolo, as he explained in After Foot on RMC, on the eve of the clash at the Emirates Stadium. “At the moment when you are preparing to play the most important match at the start of the PSG season, the one which will give an indicator, which will be the first solid reference, you find yourself with a case where the coach is confused with a player, no matter the degree of the quarrel and we end up dismissing a player at the time of playing that match, it is an acknowledgment of failure.
“With all the reservations that I am the first to have about Ousmane Dembélé, I am not a big fan of this player, he is in your squad. He is there. And when he is there, whether you like it or not, good, bad, clumsy, left foot, right foot, whatever you want, it’s the man who creates the most danger in your team,” Riolo continued. “Barcola carries out the actions but the one who creates the most danger and who, in addition, has even been a little effective this year, is Dembélé. How can you manage to put yourself in such a situation, on the eve of the match more importantly, to fall out with a key player in your squad? How are you going to make this decision by throwing it in everyone’s face? Are you going to justify yourself by wasting a quarter of an hour in a press conference? a very important Champions League match. It’s a failure situation.”
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“Luis Enrique is not a fan of Dembélé”
Beyond this sidelining, Daniel Riolo is convinced that Luis Enrique does not appreciate the style of the winger of the France team on the pitch: “Last year, I said that Luis Enrique wasn’t a fan of Dembélé and if there had been a way to make him go… He’s not a Luis Enrique type player and he never will be. When Dembélé misses something, look at Luis’ face. Enrique. It’s not the face of a coach who applauds, who encourages, it’s the face of a coach who is sorry, heartbroken, drunk by this kind of failure. It doesn’t correspond to his football. Enrique, he’s a dictator. He likes things to be square in a certain way. He has a vision, he’s a dogmatist and doesn’t fit in with the players he likes.
“Luis Enrique wants a squad with his pawns with him,” supported the member of After Foot. “For him, the players are pawns. There are no humans facing him, they are pawns. So he will get confused with Dembélé. It will last, because it will leave traces. It’s further proof of his communist vision of football. There is not a head that should stick out. It is the collective that must never leave the frame.