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France manager's team talk focusing on meaninglessness of existence

FRANCE manager Didier Deschamps has told his team that existence is meaningless, all life’s strivings end in death, and winning will not bring them happiness.

The manager, who won World Cup and Euro trophies as a player, lit an unfiltered Gauloise and told his squad that those victories were dust on the wind as theirs would soon be.

He said: “Life is brutal and it is pointless. To achieve a goal is to realise its meaninglessness and to stare into the abyss of extinction.

“When we won in 2018 I have never felt so hollow. Afterwards I sipped Rioja and thought to myself, this wine is real. This bread is real. The World Cup? A mirage.

“That night I began an affair with my sister-in-law. Why not? We would meet in anonymous hotels along the Biarritz coast and make love like animals, like strangers. There was more truth in our fervent couplings than in anything sanctioned by FIFA.

“Afterwards, sweat cooling on our naked bodies, we discussed philosophy. Sartre, Foucault, the great goalkeeper Camus, and I understood that my destiny was to manage my country until I embraced the failure of my brief time in this lighted void.

“Will that failure come tonight? Perhaps. Perhaps not. But however long we triumph, we only postpone the certainty that it will come. So let’s go out there, and play football.”

Five reasons there's never anything you fancy in the fridge for dinner

IT’S dinnertime again and there’s not a single f**king thing in the fridge you want to eat. Here’s why:

You have no imagination

This is not the set of Ready Steady Cook and you can’t improvise like Ainsley. How are you, an ordinary office worker from Hull, supposed to envisage a way to magic two courgettes and a tin of rice pudding into a risotto primavera? The best you’re likely to manage is transforming a block of mouldering Cathedral City into cheese on toast. But you had that yesterday.

It’s too late

Those potatoes would have been just the ticket if only you’d been arsed to slap them in the oven three weeks ago, before they started sprouting new life. Or you could have chopped them into a lovely frittata along with the onions that have birthed long green shoots and the eggs you vaguely remember buying in September.

You can’t be arsed

The fridge is full. You’ve bought in all the ingredients to make Jamie’s veggie paella or BBC Good Food chicken fajitas. But now the moment is here both options seem far too time-consuming, and you’re hungry right now. ‘Not pasta again,’ you mutter resentfully to yourself as you reach for the jar of pesto.

It’s all leftovers 

Is there anything less appealing than leftovers? Even if you loved the meal so much the first time that you were excited about the prospect of enjoying it again, when you come to stick it in the microwave it’s always a disappointment. Just push those Tupperwares to the back of the shelf to go mouldy, and fire up Deliveroo.

You’re missing the key component

You can hardly make a stir fry when you’re out of soy sauce. And it’s not physically possible to ingest an oven chip without ketchup. And so you head off to the shops to buy these key ingredients, safe in the knowledge that you won’t make it past the kebab shop without buying dinner there instead.

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