What Really Happened in the France-Netherlands Tunnel?

June 21st, 2008 | by: Laurie | Comments(11)

After the France-Netherlands game, where France was demolished, 4-1, reports started coming out that France players Patrick Vieira and Patrice Evra had come to blows in the tunnel and had to be physically separated.

And France fans are thinking Um…WHAT?!? So I went digging and found this video. Which really didn’t tell me much either.

What it clearly shows is Patrick Vieira being restrained from something, and then quickly hustled away by Jean-Alain Boumsong. And Evra is the one who’s kind of pushed toward the wall as Boumsong is taking charge of Vieira. But if I hadn’t read that Vieira and Evra had a fight, I wouldn’t see that in the video. And you can clearly hear somebody (France teammate Eric Abidal?) muttering, “Ouais ta gueule, homme du match,” which is a very insulting way of saying, “Yeah, shut your mouth, man of the match.”

Why would he say that to Evra?

Guess what? English papers to the rescue again! (You can always count on them to leave no dirt undug.) The Independent gives a different account. One that feels like it could have been the way things happened.

Seems that what you don’t see in the video is Dutch player Ruud van Nistelrooy waiting further down the tunnel to have it out with Vieira.

The two men [Vieira and van Nistelrooy] are understood to have traded insults after France’s 4-1 defeat to the Dutch in Berne last Friday after Van Nistelrooy purposely waited for Vieira after the game.

…for now the country is consumed with video footage of Vieira in the tunnel after the Netherlands game. It has been claimed that the pictures show Vieira being pulled away from an argument with Patrice Evra, the Manchester United left-back. That has been denied and it is the moments after that which are alleged to be the spiciest. Van Nistelrooy was said to be waiting for Vieira with whom he has had a turbulent relationship from his time at United. In his autobiography published in 2005, Vieira, who was included in the France squad despite a thigh injury, called the Dutch striker “a cheat and a coward”, “deceitful” and “a nasty piece of work”.

Yeah. That would do it.

An alternative theory is that Vieira was being restrained after a supporter (I’ve read French and I’ve read Dutch, in different sources) spit on him. That would make sense too. Vieira does have a bit of a temper. I don’t think he’d take that well.

My guess is that we’ll never know what really happened in the tunnel. But I don’t think it was Big Pat trying to take out little Patrice.