Allez Les Bleus/Cherchez Les Femmes: A Cool Interview with Lilian Thuram

Check out this interview with Lilian Thuram, conducted by Pierce Freelon via Blackademics. I stumbled onto this exploring the website generated by Professor Lauren Dubois's course on World Cup politics. Amazingly, Thuram was in residence at Duke as a part of this course. 



Cheers to Blackademics.  And Dubois's course site is really neat, but it looks like the class could have done a lot more vis a vis women.

Given the smart, politically engaged interviews Thuram offers, I wish someone would ask him about recent campaigns regarding homophobia, or, even better, I wish someone would raise the issue of Eudy Simelane's murder to ask if male footballers had thought about working with FIFA around the South Africa World Cup to make some sort of statement against the sexist and homophobic violence directed against black lesbians there.  But, hey, that's moi, asking for la lune.

Left Back Forward

My team put me forward the other week - we were up by two, and my charge was to play defense up top - to "make trouble," which, of course, I love to do.

I've never played forward at the end of a match like this. Wow. There was minimal pressure to score. Nevertheless I did manage a good shot that caught the top of the post and bounced back to a teammate who sent it wide. I ran a lot and worked hard, but I was a hundred times more relaxed than I am on the back line. No matter how far ahead we are, on the back line I never enjoy the lead. The lead is ours to blow. It is so stressful. I never knew how much I felt the full weight of that burden until it was lifted by the captain's request to put this left back forward.

The degree to which I feel that stress is the biggest obstacle to playing my best in league matches. Like many, my best game is reserved for those settings where there are no stakes - when we play for the love of it and for no other reason. For me, that's Wednesday nights in a rag-tag scrimmage that starts around 9:00pm. If I could play that game every night, I'd play until my legs fell off. (As it is, we play once a week until the lights go off.)

Ironically, the greatest professional players - the ones who play for the highest stakes - seem able to tap into the joy and a certain fearlessness whatever the setting.

And so defender Lilian Turham knocked in the only two goals of his storied career playing for France in a 1998 World Cup semifinal against Croatia, sending the first one in when France was down one-nil. This man must feel the adrenalin but not the nerves.