Team Focus: Gazélec Ajaccio's Historic Moment is a Shock For On-fire Nice
“N’attendez pas la pluie pour mouiller le maillot” - ‘don’t wait for the rain to get your shirt soaking wet’, says the banner behind the goal at Gazélec Ajaccio’s modest Stade Ange-Casanova. If Corsica can be climatically inhospitable at this time of year, the only impediment to view on the pitch as Saturday’s game with Nice kicked off was artificially created, as the remnants of a flare lit from within an enthusiastic, if small crowd.
Still, one assumes it was a heck of a shock for Yoann Cardinale as the ball soared out of the fog and straight past his right ear with the game barely underway. The young Nice goalkeeper won’t have been the only one caught unawares. In a season in which promoted Gazélec have already been caught short on so many occasions, Grégory Pujol’s stunning, van Basten-esque volley was not the start to proceedings that anyone at the hastily-redeveloped Ange-Casanova on Saturday night was really expecting.
Of current Ligue 1 players, only Zlatan Ibrahimovic (81) has scored more goals in the competition than Pujol (now on 73). Both have risen in that hierarchy after the summer moves abroad of André-Pierre Gignac and Mevlut Erding and the recent retirement of Djibril Cissé. Yet the 35-year-old Pujol - whose goals have come in the service of Nantes, Sedan, Valenciennes and now Gazélec - hasn’t scored many as valuable as Saturday’s opener, which stunned Claude Puel’s side after 33 seconds.
Once the mist had (quickly) cleared, it didn’t get much better for Nice. Despite having the fortune to be gifted an equaliser by Roderic Filippi’s own goal - self-effacingly referred to as “magnificent” by the defender himself after the game - Gazélec fought back, with Filippi putting Thierry Laurey’s team back in front before star and man of the match Damjan Djokovic (rating 8.33) sealed the deal before half-time.
Laurey was a relieved man after finally registering the club’s first top-flight win at the eleventh attempt. If Gazélec - in keeping with their supporters’ plea on that banner - have put plenty of effort in so far this season, they have rarely looked as controlled as they did on this occasion. “We’ve waited a long time for this,” said the coach, “even if we’ve come close a fair few times before. This time, we managed to be clinical.”
He’s not wrong. Gazélec had 13 shots to Nice’s 9 - with an impressive 6 on target - despite having just 36% of possession on the night. So a team that scored only 4 times in their opening 10 league games of the season ended up hitting another 3 in the first 43 minutes of this, their fifth home game of the season.
One can understand Laurey’s frustration up to this point, which has been apparent on more than one occasion in his dealings with the media. Nobody has pummelled his team this season, with even trips to Paris Saint-Germain and Saint Etienne resulting in 2-0 defeats, when many neutrals predicted they would be buried under an avalanche of goals on each occasion.
The coach was still lamenting his side’s inability to prise any tangible reward from the visit to Stade Geoffroy-Guichard last week after this weekend’s match. Laurey’s sense of disappointment was notable in his team selection, with six changes to the XI from last week’s defeat and a tactical switch too, adjusting his 4-2-3-1 in to the nationwide en vogue of 4-1-2-1-2.
If this made better sense for a home game that Gazélec wanted to be aggressive in, the change quickly bore its fruits, with goalkeeper Clément Maury providing the assist for Pujol’s spectacular opener as Nice failed to deal with his booming clearance downfield. Maury was just the third goalkeeper to register an assist in Europe’s top 5 leagues this season. The direct approach worked wonders for the home side, and was a clear policy to unsettle the visitors. Maury’s assist was one of 29 long balls he played, supplemented by a significant number by defenders Alex Coeff (12, who played in an unaccustomed role at right-back), Jérémie Brechet (7) and left-back Pablo Martínez (9).
Gazélec were by no means one dimensional, however. Djokovic, who played 4 key passes, was at the sharp end of a zesty move, which he finished for the clinching goal. They used the wide areas excellently, with Coeff and Martínez both stretching the play with their runs - see the player average position chart - and their early, long deliveries. Amos Youga and Djokovic also pulled out wider than the front players, too, with the experienced David Ducourtioux holding the fort in the sentinel role.
It was a surprise too that Nice were such malleable victims, having begun the weekend in 4th place in the table and on a run of 4 successive wins. They were top scorers in the division with 24 goals and had already won on the island just over a month ago, at the notoriously difficult home of Bastia, where champions PSG struggled to dig out a result last week.
Laurey, though, had done his homework. Identifying the high positions taken up by both Nice full-backs, Jérémy Pied and Ricardo Pereira, he aimed to exploit the space behind them. Both wingers by trade, Pied and Ricardo were again stationed in advanced roles on Saturday - again, refer to the player average position chart - and Gazélec took advantage. All three of their goals originated from the Gazélec right (Ricardo’s side), with 46% of their attacks begun on that flank.
Whether this is a watershed for the smallest club in the league or simply a rare highlight remains to be seen, but Gazélec have proved to themselves that they can compete with the big boys in a one-off situation, at the very least.
Could the win over Nice prove to be a turning point in Ajaccio's season? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below
