Olympique de Marseille owed revenge to their angry public after recent defeats to Paris Saint-Germain and Annecy. A few minutes away, the reconciliation almost took place, Sunday March 12 in the evening, during the reception of Strasbourg for the closing of the 27th day of the championship.

OM, who were leading 2-0, despite defender Leonardo Balerdi being sent off half an hour into the game, broke down in the last moments of the match, losing twice in less than a minute and a half. The goals in quick succession from Jean-Eudes Aholou, first on the second half of a corner (88th) then from a terrible strike in the top corner the next minute (89th), deprives the Marseillais of an important victory. After Kevin Gameiro equalized at the last second with an incredible volley in the top corner in the first leg, Strasbourg will have definitely cost OM dearly this season.

But since there is still a qualification for the Champions League to go and OM are still second, with two points ahead of Lens and five over Monaco, the Vélodrome only briefly whistled before encourage his team again. Before kick-off, a few banners deployed in the two corners had already come to remind us that the slap inflicted by PSG in Ligue 1 (3-0) then the elimination against Annecy, a Ligue 2 club, in the Coupe de France were not yet forgotten.

“The referee got it wrong”

And the first minutes confirmed that OM are certainly not going through their best period of the season with a sharp strike from Ruslan Malinovskyi (19th), some excesses and fantasies from Nuno Tavares on the left, but above all much less pressing and intensity than in its finest hours.

Opposite, with his more than 600 matches in L1, the Corsican coach of Strasbourg, Frédéric Antonetti, knows his business and felt that there was undoubtedly a blow to be played against this OM. The Alsatians were thus dangerous quickly on a few counterattacks. On a long opening from the former Marseillais Morgan Sanson and a bloody call from Habib Diallo, the entire OM defense was taken in depth. Leonardo Balerdi, he had the bad idea to touch the Senegalese striker, who collapsed and pushed Mr. Pignard to show the red card.

“The referee made a mistake and for me it’s a non-existent red,” Olympian coach Igor Tudor said at a press conference. “As a former player, I know the difference between a touch and a push. There he just touched it and the referee couldn’t tell the difference,” he said.

Until the break, OM managed their numerical inferiority, rather painfully. But when they returned from the locker room, Marseille had an opportunity to give another meaning to this badly embarked match, and they seized it. From a well-placed free kick, Malinovskyi struck hard and on target, which was enough to put Matz Sels in trouble. The Strasbourg goalkeeper badly repelled the Ukrainian’s strike and Chancel Mbemba popped up to open the scoring (1-0, 49th).

Historic hat-trick of Lensois Openda

Sead Kolasinac’s injury was then a new difficulty on the way to OM, but the penalty obtained by Alexis Sanchez for a shirt pulling seemed to be enough to keep Marseille happy. The Chilean transformed it with a cross shot (2-0, 76th) and the Tudor team then only had to hold on for a quarter of an hour. The Croatian technician’s changes did not help him, but neither he nor his players were really guilty of the thunderclap signed Aholou on the equalizer.

“There is the satisfaction of coming back but also frustration with the game we had. OM had no chance, they scored two goals from set pieces, analyzed Frédéric Antonetti. In the 87th minute, I was a little disillusioned. I was wondering how we could lose this match and then football is football…”

Punished at the end of the match, OM therefore remain an average team at home. Next week she will be outside where she shines. But it will be in Reims, invincible for nineteen games in L1, and winner in Monaco, Sunday (1-0).

The second place of the Marseillais is now in great danger because Lens begins to push hard behind. The Sang et Or, who had just gone three games without a win in all competitions, recovered perfectly after their great success in Clermont (4-0) in the afternoon. It was above all the performance of Openda that caused a sensation. The Lensois striker single-handedly blasted the Clermont defense by scoring three goals in quick succession in the first period (31st, 34th, 35th), the fastest hat-trick of the last fifty years in the league, with that of Lille Matt Moussilou in 2005 against Istres.