France captain Kylian Mbappe is facing criticism in his home country for skipping Les Bleus\u2019 Nations League games against Israel and Belgium while being available to play for Real Madrid.<\/p>\n
The forward picked up a muscle injury last month but made his return to the pitch in the Champions League last Wednesday.<\/p>\n
France coach Didier Deschamps left Mbappe out of the squad he announced on Thursday, saying the 25-year-old lacked preparation, having played too few matches.<\/p>\n
Mbappe started Real\u2019s La Liga game against Villarreal on Saturday.<\/p>\n
\u201cEither you\u2019re injured, and you don\u2019t play with your club and you\u2019re not called up in the national team,\u201d former France international Maxime Bossis told French sports daily L\u2019Equipe on Monday.<\/p>\n
\u201cBut when you come off the bench in the Champions League and you start a league game, it makes things fuzzy. He\u2019s a special player. We\u2019ve known that with Michel Platini when we still wanted him with us when he was injured.\u201d<\/p>\n
Mbappe\u2019s situation is more complicated because the former Paris St Germain player is the national team captain after being handed the armband ahead of Antoine Griezmann, who announced his retirement from international football last week.<\/p>\n
Griezmann\u2019s commitment to Les Bleus was never in doubt as the Atletico Madrid forward played a record 84 consecutive matches for his country between 2017 and 2024.<\/p>\n
\u201cAs a captain (Mbappe) must be an example for the fans, and he has not been,\u201d Fabien Bonnet, spokesperson for the Irresistibles Francais, the main France supporters\u2019 group, told L\u2019Equipe. \u201cWhat emerges is that the real captain, Antoine Griezmann, is gone.\u201d<\/p>\n
France, second in Group A, face Israel in Budapest on Thursday and travel to Belgium next Monday.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
France captain Kylian Mbappe is facing criticism in his home country for skipping Les Bleus\u2019 Nations League games against Israel and Belgium while being available to play for Real Madrid. The forward picked up a muscle injury last month but made his return to the pitch in the Champions League last Wednesday. France coach Didier […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":25,"featured_media":51059,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[175],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-51058","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-sports"],"aioseo_notices":[],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51058","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/25"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=51058"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51058\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":51067,"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51058\/revisions\/51067"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/51059"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=51058"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=51058"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=51058"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}