Lille are finally over Marcelo Bielsa and ready to fight for Europe

Christophe Galtier’s conservatism has allowed Lille to make careful but considerable progress in Ligue 1

By Adam White and Eric Devin for Get French Football News

Christophe Galtier’s reputation in France isn’t quite on par with that of Tony Pulis or Sam Allardyce, that of being an overly negative, needs-must type, but neither has he ever shown much interest in attacking football. His teams at Saint-Étienne, who he regularly guided to the European places despite limited resources and key players departing were decidedly prosaic, often deployed in a 4-3-3 with full-backs who rarely made it forward. It was more of the same last season after he supplanted Marcelo Bielsa, but there were brief uses of the sort of 4-2-3-1 that Galtier deployed on Saturday evening against a Rennes side who have spent heavily of late, eclipsing Lille as the league’s current ambitious outsiders after the opening day.

Even as the formation with which Galtier has started the season contains shadows of the familiar, likewise the playing personnel (only summer signings Jonathan Bamba and Zeki Çelik were making their debuts for Lille), the verve with which they played was truly remarkable. Nicolas Pépé cut a forlorn figure under Bielsa as striker last season, but the January return from loan of Lebo Mothiba gave Les Dogues a physical focal point around which to build, seeing the former Angers man thrive instead as right-sided inverted winger, scoring nine goals and assisting on a further five. One wondered at that juncture what the team might have been, had Galtier been afforded more space by having a similarly talented complement on the opposite flank, as the frustrating Luiz Araújo was often preferred on the left.

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