While Salomon Olembe regrets the loss at the Moustoir after the resounding win against Nice, he is also convinced of his team’s capacity to bounce back. Interview.

Salomon, we saw a very different OM from the one that beat Nice. What was it like watching from the bench?
Against Nice, we didn’t play perfectly. But the team did play well, more at ease and much more confident. We said to ourselves we could reproduce the same performance. But the opponent was different and had other plans. So we saw errors creeping in. On the bench, it’s your job to encourage your team-mates to keep going after they stumble. From the inside, you see things differently, but I don’t think that on Saturday we played badly. We simply didn’t have any consistency in our sequences of play. We started the match calmly but finished at 200 miles an hour. That means that we should have been playing like we were at the end all the way through the match.

But there isn’t much difference between Lorient and Nice…
But, as I said, we thought we could reproduce the performance we put in against Nice, we thought that’s how it would play out. We’re missing some players, Habib Beye is injured, but that’s not really important. We have the same players, we train all the time. We started the game aiming to make it through the first 15 minutes, confident with a good result behind us. But then we don’t start the game so well. We can always find reasons for this. But the most important thing is that we didn’t play as we did against Nice. The essential point is to find out why we finished the match at 200 miles an hour but started it so timidly.

Is the end of the season getting complicated?
It’s posing some serious questions as to the objectives of the club. From here on out, we have to leave the objectives aside and take each match as it comes. Part of the disappointment of losing in Lorient is that had we won, we would have scared our direct rivals and would have put ourselves in a more comfortable position.

Does OPM have the capacity to bounce back?
In any case 8 matches remain. We will boost ourselves at home against Lille. But we know we haven’t been travelling well. And it’s there that we have to find something extra, something missing in the past. For example, the match against Nice has become a source of inspiration, even though we lost just afterwards. But I feel this squad is capable of anything. We started the season with a cascade of victories, but then we dipped considerably, then we picked up again. Just as the team is capable of picking itself up, so I think it’s possible to get back on firm footing. But from now on we need to do it, not say it.