Ligue 1 Review | Lyon’s confidence flows ahead of Manchester United decider | OneFootball

In what is turning into a breathless end of the season with six clubs competing for the three remaining Champions League places, it was hard not to think that Olympique Lyonnais had some reservations about travelling to the Stade de l’Abbé-Deschamps to face AJ Auxerre at such a crucial point of the campaign.

Since being promoted back to Ligue 1 at the end of last season, the Burgundy team have cemented a reputation for being a difficult place to travel to with a playing style that embraces gritty defence-first football. According to stats from Opta, Auxerre have the third least amount of possession and make the most tackles in the league.

This season, the old stadium remains the only ground in France that Paris Saint-Germain have failed to score at, as Auxerre frustrated the league champions to a 0-0 draw back in December. And yet, Lyon, riding a wave of positivity into the remaining games of the season, managed an impressive 3-1 victory.

Paulo Fonseca guides Lyon from afar

The scoreline hides that this was, for stretches, an uncomfortable evening for Lyon. Their breakthrough only came in the second half when Georges Mikautadze was brought down in the box by the goalkeeper Donovon Léon. The floodgates creaked open as Rayan Cherki and Alexandre Lacazette secured a victory that would bring Lyon up to fourth in the table.

For so much of this century, Lyon have been a familiar name in the Champions League having reached the semi-finals twice, the last of which in the 2019/2020 season being, their final involvement to date in Europe’s most prestigious competition. And now with, five games remaining it feels as if the future is in their hands.

Paulo Fonseca, who, since his nine-month ban was implemented, haunts the stadiums of France like Ligue 1’s own Phantom of the Opera, has Lyon firing on all cylinders at exactly the right time. Even with his influence limited to the stands, his side play an attractive and winning style of football (having only lost three games across all competitions since the start of February).

Rayan Cherki unleashed

A lot of that has to do with the way Fonseca has let Cherki blossom into the player he has always threatened to become since first emerging from the Lyon academy in 2019. Fonseca’s arrival at the end of January has sparked a complete uptick in form, with Cherki scoring six and assisting 10 across all competitions (compared to five goals and seven assists for the first six months of the season).

Fonseca has form for helping mercurial talents become less temperamental, having helped transform Edon Zhegrova into a more consistent player during his time coaching Lille OSC. There is now an inevitability about the way Cherki plays, a palpable feeling that when he pulls on a Les Gones shirt, something magic is about to happen.

The confidence he transmits on the pitch is reflected in the way he speaks. After the 2-2 draw on Thursday night against Europa League quarter-final opponents, Manchester United, Cherki warned the Premier League side, “We were never scared of them, and we never will be scared of them. We’ll go to [Old Trafford] to win, too attack, and not to defend as they did here.” It could be easy to dismiss this talk as overconfidence from a young player, but perhaps Manchester United should be wary of an on-song Lyon ahead of Thursday night’s decider.

This week’s Ligue 1 sub-plots

GFFN | Nick Hartland