France Choke. L'Équipe Serves Up Scathing Player Ratings After Semi-Final Collapse to Spain.

Mikel Oyarzabal's first-half penalty. Pedro Porro's finish after the break. That was all it took. Just two goals. Wednesday. To snuff out Didier Deschamps' World Cup dreams. This wasn't the France we'd been sold. The tournament favourites, remember? What we got instead was a mess. Absolute rubbish. No wonder the press went scorched-earth.

Brutal. That's the only word for L'Équipe's judgment. Not a single French player scraped above 5/10. Not one. Their headline summed it up: "powerless." Lucas Digne? Two out of ten. For that brain-dead penalty. Dembélé and Olise also earned a miserable 2/10. Their attacking 'contributions' were invisible. Even Kylian Mbappe, the golden boy, the one bright spark all tournament, could only manage a pitiful 3/10. Deschamps? Yeah, he got a 3/10 too. Tells you everything, doesn't it?

The rest of the French press weren't exactly sending flowers either. Le Parisien screamed "Rude awakening." Said France just "never found the key" to Spain's backline. Corse Matin? They just went straight for "disappointment" – in Spanish, no less. Le Figaro claimed Spain "taught France a lesson." Ouest France was dramatic: "end of the American dream." More like the end of reality for these guys.

Then Deschamps tried to talk. Admitted, sort of, that France blew it. "We lost to ourselves, not to Spain," he mumbled. Blamed it on "below-standard execution" and "technical lapses." Sounded like excuses to me. The coach, bless his heart, is out after Saturday's meaningless third-place play-off. He also tried to drag in "unavailable players" and "caution issues" that supposedly tied his hands tactically. Right. Because good teams always have their best players on the field, and suspensions are a surprise.