Jean-Louis Gasset: "We can move mountains"

How is your team doing two days before their next match?

Everyone is ready and training in high spirits. That allows us to have more options and to be able to adapt to a possible injury. Right now, we can control just about every eventuality. That’s good because we saw the importance of the substitute players, last week. Everyone has to be in the same state of mind.

What do you think of the performance delivered by Loïs Diony?

Positioned on the left wing, he doesn’t have the worries of a striker and I think that he’s luckier when he arrives with a bit of notoriety. In any case, the players are pretty free in front to swap places. The most important thing is that everyone makes the defensive efforts.

What does the Stade de Reims inspire in you, your next adversary?

They’re a difficult adversary because they’re well-organized and they let in few goals. They have one of the best defensive lines in the championship with Paris and Montpellier and they’re becoming very difficult to outmanoeuvre when they score first. In regards of this match, we know where we’re going. It’s a team that will resemble all the other team that want to earn a point at the Geoffroy-Guichard stadium. They’re going to wait for us, adopt a defense strategy and want to counter us.

What is your assessment of your crazy match against Angers?

We took three points and that’s life-changing. Winning a match gives us a greater feeling of serenity and confirms that our players are all at the level they should be at, even the substitutes are giving it their all. With this state of mind, we can move mountains even if things get off to a bad start. Everything is possible if everyone has this state of mind. Even if there remain many points to take, Angers, it’s our benchmark match in terms of our state of mind.

Was it your words that instilled this state of mind?

We just had a poor month in terms of points. I had to adopt a harder tone and I outlined the course of action to follow. Football is our job, our career. If we only focus on the positive, we don’t advance. Against Angers, I had the response that I was expecting but this shouldn’t be a brief success.

Will the break do your players some good?

Everything will depend on the outcome of the match against Reims. It’s never good to dwell on an outcome for 15 days that isn’t satisfactory. So I hope that we’ve learned our lesson and that we’ll begin the break on the heels of a victory. That’ll do us some good to decompress because we’ll then play 5 matches in 17 days.

What was your reaction to the travel pan that deprives the Peuple Vert from attending the derby in Lyon?

When I saw the sanction yesterday, I had already found the fine very heavy for the club and generally speaking, I see that we go from sanction to sanction and we don’t move forward. Power struggle is taking place while a dialogue should have been started. The French Football League has decided, we’re obliged to act on their decision but we’re disappointed because we had high hopes that our fans would come with us. A derby is a historic match! Fans of both teams deserve to celebrate. But in the end, we spend more time talking about the League’s sanction than about the upcoming match. It’s tiresome.