France’s Euro Qualifer Call-ups To Be Announced Thursday

May 22nd, 2007 | by: Laurie | View Comments

The List will be revealed on Thursday. Who do you think will be on it? And what formation do you think they’ll play this time?

My thoughts, with players listed in no particular order, give us a field a lot like what we saw in March. And I’m kind of finding my brain stuck in 4-4-2 mode. I guess I forgot to take my creativity pills today. But here are my guesses:

Goalkeepers: Grégory Coupet, Mickaël Landreau

Defenders: François Clerc, (and I have no idea who the backup right back will be. Football.fr is saying Pascal Chimbonda, who had a pretty good year for Tottenham, or possibly Albin Ebondo from Toulouse). And Philippe Mexès, William Gallas, Lilian Thuram, Julien Escudé, Eric Abidal, Patrice Evra. (He’d better call up Evra this time, because I personally adore Patrice Evra, and that should be reason enough, right? And it could be Sébastien Squillaci over Escudé, although I personally like Escudé better. But then again, that could just be me listening to my own personal bias towards Very Pretty Players. But…um…yeah.)

Midfield: Claude Makélélé, Lassana Diarra, Jérémy Toulalan, Franck Ribéry, Florent Malouda, Samir Nasri… Possibly Abou Diaby again? And Rio Mavuba? And I know I’m missing an attacking midfielder or two if we go 4-4-2. Who do you think? Sidney Govou? Or somebody else? Attacking midfield is an area where I’d really like to see some more depth.

Forwards: My favorite Nicolas Anelka, of course, and Djibril Cissé (who seems to have come back into form recently), and my favorite young gun Karim Benzema. Inara has called for a personal Benzema thigh protector to keep Karim healthy for the next couple of weeks. Sounds good to me. Any volunteers? Also perhaps Frédéric Piquionne again? Or somebody entirely new? I’m guessing no Sylvain Wiltord (given what he’s going through at Lyon right now) but I may be wrong. Football.fr is guessing David Trézéguet, based on the fact that Juventus won promotion to Serie A over the weekend. But I thought the whole Serie A vs. Serie B thing for Trézéguet was based on the quality of play they were seeing week after week, and that hasn’t changed yet. So I’m thinking we won’t see David on the list. But you can never tell with Raymond.

Those are my predictions. Now ell me about yours.