Alain Casanova threatened with death, it was too much for an already weakened coach

To speak of a thunderclap in a cloudless sky would be very exaggerated. But finally, the departure of Alain Casanova, effective since Thursday, was not expected so early in the TFC, despite a poor 18th place in Ligue 1, a series of five games without a win and a game more and more disturbing. Never the president
Olivier Sadran had not decided so quickly in the season since taking office in 2001. Wednesday, the now former Toulouse coach led the session as usual, and normally prepared the friendly match scheduled Thursday night in Pau, against the Spaniards of Eibar.

Finally, the adventure restarted in June 2018, after a first romance from 2008 to March 2015, came to an abrupt end on Thursday morning, after a discussion with Sadran. Casanova was (like the president delegate Jean-François Soucasse, who manages the club daily) the target of the supporters for weeks. The challenge had further inflated in the derby piteously lost at home against Bordeaux on Saturday (1-3), with many calls for resignation descended from the stands of the Stadium.

Wrecked derby, the TFC never stops flowing https://t.co/ri0i26ZKYg

– 20 Minutes (@ 20Minutes) October 6, 2019

But some people have gone beyond the limits of the 58-year-old technician who has been through Lens (Ligue 2) from June 2017 to August 2018. Thus, Casanova has been targeted by death threats on social networks. This degradation of the climate, which recalls what Bruno Genesio lived in Lyon, convinced the French-Spaniard, who arrived at the TFC as goalkeeper in 1992, the need to turn the page.

A very complicated second term

The statement issued by the club evokes a separation "by mutual agreement" between the leaders and Casanova. Contacted, the management did not want to say more. If the serious insults accelerated things, the situation of the technician became more and more complicated in his core business. While the Casanova 1 era had been marked, from the start, by a European qualification ten years ago (the last of the TFC to date), Casanova 2 was a failure: 16th place in 2018-2019, and 18th position after nine days this season.

Several players, if they had not dropped their coach, regretted in private the repetitive nature of the training, but also the lack of intensity and play during the sessions. In addition, the qualitative recruitment of the summer (Winner, Koulouris, Saïd) did not allow the club to get out of a negative dynamic that does not date from yesterday. Since the ninth position won five years ago (by Alain Casanova …), Toulouse has never done better than a bleak 13th place in 2016-2017 (with Pascal Dupraz, the man of the remontada in spring 2016).

Who is Denis Zanko, the new (temporary) coach of the TFC? https://t.co/q4Fuytsh4s via @LesVioletsCom

– TheViolets.Com (@LesVioletsCom) October 10, 2019

And now ? The interim is provided by Denis Zanko (55), technical director of the training center. An internal appeal, as Dominique Arribagé had been in March 2015, after the first mandate of "Casa", then
Michaël Debève in January 2018, after the departure of Dupraz. The more than mitigated success of these experiments, despite two postures uprooted, calls for an external solution. The TFC has a little more than a week before the reception of Lille in Ligue 1, 19 October.

What successor on the bench?

Inevitably, the tracks are already firing, leading to coaches without a club like Antoine Kombouare, Jocelyn Gourvennec, Mickaël Landreau and Frédéric Hantz. The name of the latter, unemployed since May 2018 and the relegation of FC Metz, has often returned to the side of the Stadium in the recent past. According to our information, the challenge proposed by the flagship club of his native region is 53 years old Aveyronnais.