French team (F): Renard judges it “irresponsible to make Katoto play 90 minutes”

If the star striker of the French women's football team, Marie-Antoinette Katoto, could start for her return to blue against Austria, in the Nations League on Friday in Rennes, coach Hervé Renard judges that it would be “irresponsible to play her for 90 minutes.

“Yes, she is fit to start, since she started a Champions League match with Paris SG,” first indicated the coach about the player who missed the last World Cup due to a serious injury to the right knee, contracted at the Euro in July 2022. “Now, will she start? We will see that tomorrow evening,” continued Renard, who however ruled out having him play the entire match.

“Certainly not, not yet. It would perhaps be irresponsible to make her play 90 minutes,” he admitted, while emphasizing that there were “enough players with talent in the offensive sector to be able to manage this situation well.”

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Arriving at the head of the Blues just before the World Cup in Australia and New Zealand, Renard rubbed shoulders for the first time with the Parisian center forward, with whom he had spoken during his convalescence.

“It’s important to keep in touch with players who have been unavailable for a long time,” he explained. “It’s easy to send messages when everything is going well and you’re scoring a lot of goals and winning a string of victories. But it’s important to show support and I wanted to tell her that it will take as long as it takes but that at one point or another, she would be back,” he explained.

For this gathering, “it is unfortunately only a few (training) sessions before an important match” but “we welcome it with great pleasure and we know that in the more or less short, or medium term, it will go a long way bring us,” he further assured.