Remember Chamakh? The joke’s on Bordeaux now

Forgiven: a Bordeaux fan M Salut hammers at badminton

Those of you with hair have torn it out, the milk is well and truly spilt or even spilled Over at non-football Salut!, I wondered aloud whether watching Sunderland could, like smoking, seriously damage your health. It has been a week in which a supporter of West Brom, of all clubs, cockily dismissed Sunderland in his “fan’s view” for the Daily Mail as “physical, determined but limited”. And that was just the first-half, when we were ahead. So let’s change tack. Here, before we start fretting about Birmingham away, is another episode in our French Fancies series …

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Yes. I really should get out more. The time to end the ridiculous feud with Les Girondins de Bordeaux has surely past. Who cares if the club president Jean-Louis Triaud and his then manager, Laurent Blanc, insulted Sunderland AFC?

But every time I feel Salut! Sunderland should move on, bury the hatchet, find someone else to taunt, along comes an excuse to reopen hostilities with the self-important Ligue 1 underachievers who declared that Sunderland AFC were altogether too small a club to be allowed to buy Marouane Chamakh (now at Arsenal, where he scores a little and dives a lot).

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Arsenal, Chelsea & Newcastle six-hitters leave French dreaming

Salut!’s Nice corner, our regular look at French football and in particular the exploits of our team of choice Nice, finds a club manager casting an envious gaze across the Channel …

No sexy football please, we’re French. After all the fun the French have had over the years at the expenses of the supposedly sexless British, it is our turn to gloat.

As Arsenal, Chelsea and – whisper it – Toon won their weekend games with an aggregate of 18-0, Ligue 1 stuttered to a customary cluster of scoreless draws and low-scoring wins.

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