Paul of all trades: France pin Euro hopes on perfectionist Pogba

All-round midfielder will be Les Bleus’ biggest weapon this summer

PARIS: France has high hopes for an exciting young team going into the European Championship finals on home soil, and no player embodies its essence better than the Juventus star Paul Pogba.

Pogba is a brilliant midfielder and an inspiration to youngsters in a racially diverse France, the son of migrants from Guinea who grew up on a Paris suburban housing estate and left to become a superstar at one of Europe’s biggest clubs.

“He is a great player, he’s young and people really like him off the field. That means people talk about him, for good or for bad,” France coach Didier Deschamps told La Gazzetta dello Sport last year.

Like Deschamps, Michel Platini and David Trezeguet before him, Pogba is flying the French flag at Juventus, but the Italian champions may not be able to keep the 23-year-old much longer with Europe’s wealthy giants all hovering.



“Since the start of the year I have received 20 phone calls about him a day but the right offer has not arrived yet,” said Pogba’s agent Mino Raiola.

Barcelona, Real Madrid and Paris Saint-Germain have all been linked with him.

It has been a remarkable rise for a player who initially started having kickabouts with his twin brothers Florentin and Matthias in La Renardiere.



Capable of scoring brilliant goals, his style is unorthodox, as L’Equipe recently summed up. “He arouses fascination as much as people demand great things from him,” wrote the French paper. “He is not a defensive midfielder nor an attacking midfielder. Often when one sees him play, one feels they have never seen such a phenomenon.”

Pogba himself says: “I am not a playmaker. I live for perfection, I learn from my errors. Didier Deschamps has sometimes said to me: ‘Paul, keep it simple.’”

Published in The Express Tribune, May 10^th, 2016.

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