Mbappé on the Left, Cherki Deeper: Zidane's First Draft and the Real Test Named Belgium

In the 12th minute, the ball was slotted diagonally from the left flank into the central channel. Mbappé took it on the outside of his boot, turned, and finished. It looks so ordinary that you could watch it three times and still file it away as pure instinct. The starting point is the telling part: Mbappé began the move from the left, not from the central striker position he occupied throughout the Deschamps era. The entire run was a 45-degree diagonal cutting into the space the opposing centre-backs had just vacated. A goal produced by the system, not by an individual.

I watched this one alone, two screens, one notebook. That habit dates back to 2026, when I shadowed Sunderland through the League One play-off against Charlton and live-tweeted at half-time that relegation was a chance to cut out a financial tumour. A veteran journalist pushed back hard. I wrote a 4,000-word piece built on 12 interviews with creditors and supporters to defend the argument. Sunderland went down, and I still hold the line: going down is a way of going up. Tonight I opened that notebook again, with a different question — is this a beginning, or a performance with no sequel?

A new era built on an old foundation

Zidane took over the France national team after the Deschamps years — a tenure that delivered the 2026 World Cup and a 2026 World Cup final. That legacy is heavy enough that anyone in the chair faces a choice between two roads: inherit and refine, or tear down and rebuild. Zidane chose a third road — keep the frame, change how it operates.

His first competitive match came away from home, against Turkey. Final score: 1-0. Three points, minimum objective met. Adrien Rabiot spoke afterwards about the attacking direction and about how both training methods and the way the team operates have changed. Zidane called it chapter one and described himself as the person ultimately responsible for the whole collective. The squad list included new faces given an opportunity — the signal of a cycle being prepared rather than one already closed.

That is the factual layer. The rest is where I want to linger.

Three selection decisions and one data void

The shape was recorded as a 4-3-3, but how the people were arranged is the real message. Mbappé shifted left to find space to drift inside. Dembélé was pushed central. Olise held the right. And Cherki — the player everyone wants to see in a free role — was placed in midfield.

Read those four decisions together and the logic is plain: Zidane is testing whether four attacking players can coexist without breaking the structure. The stated idea is that each uses his strengths without unbalancing the collective. It sounds sensible, but it is the kind of line every manager delivers in his first week, and only three or four matches will tell you whether it is real.

The most interesting detail is not Mbappé on the left — it is Cherki dropping into midfield. Pushing a creative player into a position that demands defensive responsibility is a classic trade-off between improvisation and balance. It suggests Zidane is prioritising structural control over individual freedom. For a player whose entire value lies in breaking patterns, this is a friction point to track across several matches, not to conclude on after one.

On Dembélé central: following his career, I lean towards this being a stopgap rather than a design. A right-sided winger pushed into the middle is usually a by-product of having too many wide attackers needing places. A false nine only really means something when it produces a numerical overload in midfield — something no data here can verify.

And this is where I stop and draw a line across the notebook. No xG. No PPDA. No possession share. No positional maps. All we have is a 1-0 scoreline, one description of the goal, and a few post-match quotes. A single sample with no process data cannot support any systemic claim about Zidane.

I have made exactly this mistake before. In 2026, during the France–Belgium semi-final, I tried a live commentary built on a "transition map" instead of conventional narration. In the first half I mispronounced Nacer Chadli's name three times and took complaints from listeners. That night I drew a 4-2-4 graphic with 14 decisive passes from Mbappé and published it on my personal blog. It drew 20,000 views in two days; colleagues called it too academic, too dry. I mispronounced a name three times on live air, but that does not make me wrong about myself. The lesson was not about whether to draw, but about not drawing before the lines have enough data to stand on.

Belgium is the real match, not Turkey

The public is celebrating. A winning start, a legendary manager, a squad rated as having special quality across all three lines. But if you ask me where the real marker of this project sits, the answer is the next fixture, against Belgium.

The away trip to Turkey was framed as demanding pragmatism. The team won 1-0, protecting the result more than imposing its game. That is a "results-positive, process-unverified" profile — the most misread kind, because it lets both the believers and the sceptics use it as evidence for their own case.

The deeper problem is dependency. The entire attacking architecture runs through Mbappé: he started the move that produced the goal, he is the captain who has just been handed the armband back, and he is the player every route must pass through. Then he had to come off with a leg problem. His condition instantly became the most watched issue before the Belgium match.

This is where I say the thing few want to hear. A project built around one player is fragile — it is a bet dressed up in tactical language. If Mbappé does not play, France lose more than a striker; they lose the spine the whole system is clinging to. And then the story in the papers flips very fast, within one fixture, from "solid start" to "dependency crisis".

There is another detail that made me pause longer than any tactical question. The original analysis I read carried a headline referencing "Mbappé – Dembélé" as a central pairing, yet across the entire body, Dembélé appears exactly once, as a positional footnote, with no quotes and no analysis. The source field is blank: no outlet, no byline, no publication date. To me that is a red flag. People remember me for three mispronunciations; I choose to remember myself across three decades on the pitch. And those decades taught me that a report without a source is not yet a report — it is a scenario. Scenarios are useful for thinking, but they cannot serve as a foundation for conclusions.

Squad depth, the five-sub rule and the final 20 minutes

There is something I always watch when big teams play international football: the five-substitution rule gives deeper squads an edge, but it also turns the final 20 minutes into an attrition war. France sit among the clearest beneficiaries of that rule, because their depth across all three lines is real, not diplomatic flattery. But when the single attacking pillar leaves the pitch injured, that depth is no longer a contingency — it becomes the only plan.

Millimetre offside lines and VAR decisions also shape this picture in ways few notice. When the margin of error is compressed to a few centimetres, the teams that depend on perfectly timed movement carry more risk. Mbappé is the kind of player who lives on the distance between himself and the last defender — which means he lives on moments where a single step of error erases a goal.

What I take away from this match

A 1-0 away win, a new manager, and a new system that has only shown its first outlines. What we are looking at is a sketch that has not been coloured in. Football is, at heart, a drama of mistakes — I just help make it worth watching.

The things to track over the coming weeks are specific. Whether Mbappé recovers in time for Belgium. Whether Cherki keeps the midfield role for two or three more matches or is released into a free role. And whether that 4-3-3 reappears intact or deforms when France meet an opponent strong enough to force them to defend in their real shape.

If Mbappé starts and France beat Belgium, we will get a week full of tributes. If he is absent and France draw, we will get a week full of analyses about crisis. Both scripts will be written in the same confident voice. As for me, after 20 years on the pitch and after three mispronunciations I remember more clearly than any beautiful goal, I keep just one habit: read the result, then read the data again, and only then allow myself a conclusion. Football has no ending — only chapters not yet written. And the next chapter of Zidane's France will begin somewhere none of us controls: the medical bulletin.