World Cup: France pays before it plays, but are Les Bleus paying too much?

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Things are going badly enough in the France camp without a politician sticking her nose into the affairs of Les Bleus, but that’s what Rama Yade has done anyway.

Yade is the country’s junior minister for sport, and the way she sees it, Coach Raymond Domenech’s team might be spending a few too many francs by staying at a luxury Indian Ocean resort in Knysna, South Africa, ahead of its World Cup opener against Uruguay on Friday in Cape Town.

‘Personally, I wouldn’t have chosen this hotel,’ Yade told Radio J in Paris. She said she had ‘urged football authorities to show decency’ by keeping costs down in difficult economic times.

Rooms at the resort start at $595 per night in the off-season.

‘If France goes far, the choice of a site with the best training conditions could seem wise,’ Yade said. On the other hand, if Les Bleus crumble as they did in 2002, the leaders of the French soccer federation ‘will have to explain themselves,’ she added.

The French team, desperately trying to get its act together by Friday after being upset, 1-0, by soccer-lowly China in its most recent tune-up, has politely suggested she go away.

-- Grahame L. Jones in Johannesburg