The soaring solo riffs of the night came from the self-deprecating man at the rear of the big band.
Lilian Thuram usually provides the backbeat for his French team–the bass line you can’t pick out unless the other players are quiet.
“I admire people who are unassuming, people who are never quite satisfied with their performance,” Thuram said last month. “Like Miles Davis, a genius who always looked to do fabulous things with his instrument.”
He chose an opportune time to become a frontman. A respected defender who had never scored a goal in international play before Wednesday night, Thuram tallied twice in a 2-1 victory that catapulted France into its first World Cup final against Brazil Sunday.
Thuram was the last man anyone would have expected to solve his team’s offensive problems. His 47th minute goal was France’s first in 315 minutes. No French forward has scored in the last four matches.
But France nonetheless has found a winning formula in all three games it has played in the knockout rounds.
“The fact is, we have 22 poets on the field who play with their feet and their hearts,” midfielder Youri Djorkaeff said.
That certainly would apply to Thuram. Aside from being a jazz aficionado, he is a great fan of the mystic musings of the late French philosopher and popular icon Antoine de Saint-Exupery, author of “The Little Prince.”
Thuram looked a bit starry-eyed when he spoke to reporters briefly after emerging from drug testing.
“Normally when I get near the goal, I can’t see straight,” Thuram said. “This time, that didn’t happen. But I’m not a hero.”
French goalkeeper Fabien Barthez, who made several spectacular catches off corner kicks and one last-second leaping save to seal the triumph, allowed himself to gloat just a little bit.
“I always told him he should go for it,” Barthez said.
Thuram, 26, was born in Guadaloupe, a French territory in the Caribbean. As a child, he dreamed of being an Olympic marathon runner. But soccer was what made him an upwardly mobile athlete after he rejoined his mother at age 9 in the Paris suburbs, where she had gone to work as a housecleaner after Thuram’s father abandoned the family.
Thuram logged six years at Monaco, one of the French league’s most prestigious addresses. With his current club, Parma, he was recognized as Italy’s best defender in 1997.
Scrappy Croatia, a 40-1 shot entering the World Cup, came out in the same physical manner it did in its match against Germany. The French looked energetic early on but soon faded into their now-habitual pattern: tough, teeth-rattling defense and an exasperating lack of offensive initiative.
One minute into the second half, Croatian striker Davor Suker took a chip pass from midfielder Aljosa Asanovic, settled it with his left foot and lashed it into the right corner of the net. The heavily French crowd went silent with dread. The other three French defenders appeared to step up to try to put Suker offside, but Thuram lagged behind, giving Suker a one-on-one with Barthez.
Less than a minute later, however, Thuram stole the ball on the right wing and passed to Djorkaeff, who returned the favor and gave Thuram a clear shot from the corner of the 18-yard box.
Thuram scored again in the 69th minute and sank to his knees in apparent disbelief as his teammates mobbed him and Barthez looked on incredulously from his goalbox.
The victory set off noisy celebrations in Paris, where people thronged the streets, dancing, drinking and honking car horns.
The only sour note for France was the 74th minute expulsion of defender Laurent Blanc, whose overtime goal in the Round of 16 enabled France to advance but who now is ineligible for Sunday’s final.
Blanc got a red card after slamming Croatian defender Slaven Bilic in the jaw with an open hand while the two jostled for position as French playmaker Zinedine Zidane set up for a free kick.
“It’s not a catastrophe for the team, but it is for me,” said the normally self-contained Blanc. “It’s like when you have a birthday and someone brings you a big cake and then takes it away.”
