Olympique Lyonnais boss Pierre Sage explained that he didn’t want to take any risks with Alexandre Lacazette, who was ruled out of the defeat against Lens (0-3) on Sunday. However, he acknowledged that the team felt his absence.OL suffered a heavy defeat against Lens (0-3) on Sunday night without their captain. Lacazette was forced to withdraw from the game after receiving a knock in the Coupe de France match against Strasbourg during the week. Sage decided not to take any risks, although he admitted that the absence of the French international (16 caps, three goals) had an impact.”I was really under the impression that he was going to play this match and that there was no concern. Unfortunately, the test we conducted on Saturday during the team session did not confirm his participation and common sense prevailed. We thought it was better for him to continue his recovery and be able to play in the next two matches rather than take a risk and make things worse. So we stuck to that idea.”RC Lens battled to three points that put them back in the Ligue 1 top three and halted Les Lyonnais’ recent revival.”Regarding the match, indeed, he is a player who was missed in the sense that our initial game plan was to press high on the first balls. And he is a player who is capable of holding the ball up well with his back to goal, which would have allowed us to play out a bit. As a result, we had to adapt our way of playing out from the back a little.”Franck Haise, his counterpart from Lens, also acknowledged that the absence of Lyon’s striker may have contributed to his team’s clear victory. “It didn’t change anything in terms of managing the match, but it was definitely better not to have Lacazette against us, that’s for sure. Winning 3-0 in Lyon at the moment is no small feat. We faced some transitions against their low block at the beginning of the game that we didn’t capitalize on, fortunately. But we improved the things we needed to improve. We also scored the goals at key moments, which made it a match that was quite controlled overall. Even though it wasn’t perfectly controlled, it was still rather controlled.”
