And he did that with a smile, even prefixing his answer with ”you know, I played with him.” Kolkata: Vikash Dhorasoo deftly side-stepped the question on Manchester City falling foul of Premier League regulations but shared his thoughts on Zinedine Zidane becoming France’s head coach.
In 2011, while speaking to HT, Dhorasoo was asked how he would evaluate Zidane. In India then for an arthouse film his company was planning, it had been five years since he had played the last of his 18 games for France. But if Dhorasoo had made peace with losing his place to Zidane who had come out of retirement to help France make the 2006 World Cup, he wasn’t showing it. Dhorasoo had been an integral part of France’s qualifying campaign but played little against Switzerland and South Korea spending the rest of the 2006 finals on the bench. In 2004, when Dhorasoo replaced Zidane against Mexico, he was booed. Speaking in French, which was translated by Gianluca Joseph who handles his media, and English, Dhorasoo said he didn’t want to speak much about City being found guilty of almost all the 115 charges of financial foul play. Dhorasoo was referring to DR Congo’s’ Samuel Moutoussamy who played in the 2026 World Cup.
Because every tournament France play, they play to win, “He is also a coach who knows how to win and that is important. Because he is more comfortable with technique than tallying numbers, he said.
And he has this aura,” said Dhorasoo, leaning back and spreading his arms. “Do you have any other question,” he had said. That statement was more in line with “Substitute” his documentary on France’s journey through the 2006 finals. Being a footballer and not playing made him feel like crying, he has said while talking about the film. But, accepting his former club Paris St-Germain’s “level of investment changed pretty much everything”, he defended it, saying “they had a project. In favour of “bi-nationalities” – in our 2006 team, David Trezeguet could have played for Argentina; Gonzalo Higuain was eligible to represent France and Michael Olise for more than country, he said – Dhorasoo, 52, said it would help India progress and “create an identity for their diaspora. He would be happy to be the bridge, he said. “Moutoussamy can play for India if the conditions are right,” he said. Here to watch Saturday’s friendly between India and Brazil, Dhorasoo said he was also looking forward to picking Carlo Ancelotti’s brains now that he is a certified coach. “We haven’t met in 20 years and I was happy when he responded to my text,” said Dhorasoo of the Brazil coach who was his coach at AC Milan.
“It is wonderful that Zidane is the head coach. If there was one person who could have succeeded Didier Deschamps, it was him. From any other former Les Bleus player, this would have been the default response. But Dhorasoo isn’t that. Interview over. It was also his account of moving from mainstream to the margins. Once he came out of retirement, then-coach Raymond Domenech preferred Zidane to the slightly-built player of India-Mauritian origin. Dhorasoo’s lament had not been private.
