Lyon beat Nice in their first of many matches without Paulo Fonseca
===================================================================

The Lyon manager began his nine-month touchline ban at the weekend. His assistant filled in brilliantly

By 

Lyon beat Nice in their first of many matches without Paulo Fonseca
-------------------------------------------------------------------

The Lyon manager began his nine-month touchline ban at the weekend. His assistant filled in brilliantly

Lyon beat Nice in their first of many matches without Paulo Fonseca
-------------------------------------------------------------------

The Lyon manager began his nine-month touchline ban at the weekend. His assistant filled in brilliantly

“T**he role of a manager is like that of parents,” began  assistant coach-cum-child minder Jorge Maciel. “You educate your child for the moments when they aren’t with you, not those when they are.” Left at the school gates, Paulo Fonseca hugged his players as they entered the Allianz Riviera, not to see them until after the school day. Having completed the school run, the Lyon manager returned to the bus, put on his glasses, turned on his iPad and waited.

The Portuguese manager will be spending a lot of time away from his players this year. In the dying seconds of Lyon’s narrow 2-1 win over  last weekend, he violently confronted referee Benoît Millot after being shown a red card. The referee says Fonseca displayed an “intimidating attitude”, “spiralled out of control” and tried to “head-butt” him.

Fonseca denies their heads touched but, either way, he was handed a nine-month ban – which his club have called “extremely severe” and “unprecedented”. Jürgen Klopp has some sympathy with Fonseca. “I saw that Fonseca got a nine-month ban. There are similar pictures of me and referees out there, so I am really happy that I don’t get into these situations anymore,” joked the former Liverpool manager.

Lyon are exploring avenues to appeal. The club believe their manager is a victim of the current “toxic context” surrounding refereeing in France, a reference most notably to Marseille president  a week earlier, which warranted a 15-game ban.

Not only will Fonseca be banned from the touchline until the end of November, but he won’t even be allowed into the dressing room or to have any contact with his players or touchline staff prior to, during, or immediately after the game, until September. Hence the surreal scenes of a lost-looking Fonseca bidding his players farewell as they sought to do what no other  side had done this season – beat Nice on their own ground.

But once he did saunter up to the press box, he found himself in pleasant company. His counterpart, Franck Haise, also serving his own three-game touchline ban, was also up in the gods in the Allianz Riviera. The pre-match handshake, or elongated and warm embrace as it was, took place in the press box, rather than on the touchline.

“We said hello, nothing much more, just banal things. We were happy to see each other because it had been a while. It will be long for him because it is long when you’re up there. You see the match well, but you’re detached from the passion,” said Haise post-match, who unlike his counterpart, was permitted to undertake his media duties on the night.



With managers in the stands, the Nice ultras displaced from their usual stand – the result of an offensive banner unfurled during the win over  in January – and torrential conditions on the Côte d’Azur, there was an unease in what felt like a near-reality, a sort of lucid dream in which the conditions of a real football match in Nice were being mimicked but not sufficiently to trick us into believing it was real. But the Inception totem did stop spinning and there was an acceptance that, within this unfamiliar context, there was a match to be played.

With proxies on the sidelines, Lilian Nalis for  and Maciel for Lyon, the home team seized the upper hand in the first half, without making their dominance tell. Gaëtan Laborde’s close-range header was deflected on to the post by former Nottingham Forest defender Moussa Niakhaté, and Lyon goalkeeper Lucas Perri was equal to efforts from Mohamed-Ali Cho and Evann Guessand.

Lyon looked powerless, just like their manager. As the half-time whistle blew, Fonseca looked forlorn. With his video analysts deserting him and returning to the dressing room, he cut an isolated figure with the dawning realisation of his new reality scrawled over his face.

But a different Lyon side emerged for the second half. Maciel is not a “look at me” type, and he shied away from the idea that he had turned things around at the interval, but his changes swayed this match. Rayan Cherki needed less than a minute on the pitch to make his mark, sliding the ball past Marcin Bulka to give Lyon the lead. Another substitute, Ernest Nuamah, scored the second with a sumptuous curled effort from 25 yards out to secure the 2-0 win.

“It is very easy to be a manager and coach well when you have good players with a good mindset. Managers, without their players, are nothing. I want us to focus on that,” said Maciel, filling in for Fonseca in the post-match press conference. Bringing on Cherki, who tops the assists charts in Ligue 1, was a logical choice, but it was his choice and it altered the course of the match.

Maciel says he will be “a bit like an interim” in the next nine months. It could be an opportunity that propels his own career; Mikel Arteta, José Mourinho, Zinedine Zidane, and even Fonseca’s predecessor at Lyon, Pierre Sage, have all carved out managerial careers having started out as assistants.

With three points in the bag and one of the most in-form sides in France defeated, Lyon’s players were reunited with Fonseca just before midnight. He was exactly where he had left them hours prior. Open-armed in front of the team bus, he embraced them one by one as they set off on the long ride back home.

| Pos | Team         | P | GD | Pts |
|-----|--------------|---|----|-----|
| 1   | PSG         | 25| 46| 65|
| 2   | Marseille   | 25| 22| 49|
| 3   | Nice        | 25| 19| 46|
| 4   | Monaco      | 25| 17| 44|
| 5   | Lille       | 25| 13| 44|
| 6   | Lyon        | 25| 15| 42|
| 7   | Strasbourg | 25| 7  | 40|
| 8   | Lens        | 25| 1 | 36|
| 9   | Brest       | 25| -2 | 36|
| 10  | Toulouse   | 25| 5  | 34|
| 11  | Auxerre    | 25| -2 | 31|
| 12  | Rennes     | 25| -1 | 29|
| 13  | Angers      | 25| -14 | 27|
| 14  | Nantes     | 25| -15 | 24|
| 15  | Reims      | 25| -14 | 22|
| 16  | Le Havre   | 25| -27| 21|
| 17  | St Etienne | 25| -32| 20|
| 18  | Montpellier| 25| -38| 15|

_**This is an article by **_
```