“Mastery! There is not enough mastery! “ The training is intense. But Laurent Batlles insists and insists again: the ball must circulate, quickly and well. A stone’s throw from the Stade de l’Aube, an English-style enclosure with 20,000 seats, the footballers of Esperance Sportif Troyes Aube Champagne (Estac) tirelessly repeat their technical ranges. A profitable Stakhanovism. Leaders of Ligue 2, the Trojans rely on one of the most original and attractive styles of play in French football known to be timid on tactical innovations.
At 45, Laurent Batlles is the instigator. The former midfielder, who passed through Toulouse, Marseille and Bordeaux, among others, saw his first experience as a professional head coach, after three seasons spent leading the reserve team of Saint-Etienne.
“Technical mastery is crucial”
Still a little green in the business, this Zinédine Zidane lookalike – as much for the flow of speech, the faulty hair implantation as the quality of the left foot for a right-hander – assumes a precise vision of the game he wants to develop. Just like the final exercise of the day’s session: for seven minutes, one team tries to keep the ball while the other tries to recover it and score as quickly as possible.
“Technical mastery is crucial, insists Laurent Batlles. We saw it when Spanish football crushed everything. It allows you to lose less the ball and to take a minimum of goals. But it is a possession to hurt the opponent. “
Inspired by the 3-4-3 – the system theorized by Johan Cruyff (1947-2016) at Barça and then modernized for ten years by one of his successors, Pep Guardiola -, his team imposes control of the game on his opponents, sometimes accepts the imbalance, the better to catch them in default. “In his system, three defenders play very high on the field, almost with their feet on the center line. This is exceptional “, says, admiringly, Jean-Marc Furlan, coach of the rival Auxerre.
“Pleasure is an important factor”
Trained in Monaco, midfielder Tristan Dingomé relishes this singularity. “We are the only team to play like this in France. We had to adapt and we work a lot, he explains. It is not a cliché to say that French football is quite closed. Accepting the risk to be outnumbered by the opponent is more attractive. I am very happy to have landed in a team where fun is an important factor. “
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