Lilian Thuram, France's most capped player, last night hit back at suggestions by Jean-Marie Le Pen that there were too many "players of colour" in the national side, denouncing the National Front leader as being ignorant of the make-up of his country's society.
The 34-year-old Juventus centre-half won his 118th cap against Spain on Tuesday and, hailing from the French Caribbean island of Guadeloupe, is one of 16 non-whites in France's 23-man squad. He and his team-mates learned of Le Pen's comments immediately prior to the second-round match in Hanover, which Les Bleus won 3-1, with the 2007 French presidential candidate having reheated his criticisms of the 1998 side - which he denounced as "artificial" - by arguing it was not reflective of French society.
Le Pen, who was runner-up to Jacques Chirac in the 2002 presidential elections having beaten the Socialist candidate Lionel Jospin to the second round, had insisted that France "cannot recognise itself in the national side" and that "maybe the coach exaggerated the proportion of players of colour and should have been a bit more careful".
"What can I say about Monsieur Le Pen?" said Thuram ruefully. "Clearly, he is unaware that there are Frenchmen who are black, Frenchmen who are white, Frenchmen who are brown. I think that reflects particularly badly on a man who has aspirations to be president of France but yet clearly doesn't know anything about French history or society.
"That's pretty serious. He's the type of person who'd turn on the television and see the American basketball team and wonder: 'Hold on, there are black people playing for America? What's going on?'
"When we take to the field, we do so as Frenchmen. All of us. When people were celebrating our win, they were celebrating us as Frenchmen, not black men or white men. It doesn't matter if we're black or not, because we're French. I've just got one thing to say to Jean Marie Le Pen. The French team are all very, very proud to be French. If he's got a problem with us, that's down to him but we are proud to represent this country. So Vive la France, but the true France. Not the France that he wants."
That brought a round of applause from the assembled media, with Thuram equally baffled by Le Pen's criticism that some of the players, and primarily the World Cup-winning goalkeeper Fabien Barthez, are failing to sing La Marseillaise. "Whether you sing it or not doesn't make you any more or less French," he said. "Maybe we should invite Monsieur Le Pen to celebrate our next victory with us. Then he'd see that we are fiercely proud to be French and he might change his mind. Actually, he's got too much to lose by changing his mind, hasn't he?"
Raymond Domenech's squad trained with their captain Zinédine Zidane yesterday ahead of their quarter-final with Brazil, the Real Madrid veteran having picked up a slight knock against Spain.
Of more concern, at least with the fans back home, was whether tomorrow's referee, the Spaniard Luis Medina Cantalejo, might favour Brazil - the Slovakian official Lubos Michel allegedly requested Ronaldo's shirt after the Ghana match, having sent Ratomir Dujkovic, the Ghana coach, to the stands at the interval.
"We gave up after the first game worrying about referees," countered Thierry Henry. "It's not easy to be a referee. But, after the first match [against Switzerland], we gave up asking them about their decisions. You've just got to let him do his job and get on with it. But who wouldn't want Ronaldo's shirt? It might have been the only chance the guy'll ever have to meet him, so there's nothing sinister."