Question of the day: How would you handle the situation with the French World Cup team?

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Reporters from around Tribune Co. weigh in on the meltdown of France’s soccer team, ranked No. 9 in the world. Check back throughout the day for more responses, and feel free to leave a comment of your own.

Grahame L. Jones, Los Angeles Times

If the French are serious about salvaging a soccer reputation that now lies like a rain-soaked baguette in a Parisian gutter, here’s what they should do:

Send all the haughty and incompetent federation honchos back to Charles de Gaul on the first flight out. Make sure they take lame-duck Coach Raymond Domenech along with them. Fly Laurent Blanc, the coach-to-be and 1998 World Cup winner, to South Africa, if he is not already there. Have Blanc call a team meeting and tell the prima donnas that either they defeat South Africa on Tuesday or they never play for Les Bleus again.

If all that fails, there’s always the guillotine.

[Updated at 10:35 a.m.:

George Diaz, Orlando Sentinel

I would take everyone to see Les Misérables, because, after all, aren’t the French a bunch of pathetic, miserable boors?

I’m just a rubber-necker at this point, so I have no idea how an implosion of this magnitude can happen. But I suggest that the French soccer federation folks are walking around their offices as emperors with no clothes.

They’ve hired a coach no one wants to play for and who will be fired as soon as France is eliminated from the World Cup -- quite possibly Monday when the French face host nation South Africa. For once, let those atrocious vuvuzelas drown out the whiny French static noise.

The federation has also managed to piece together a bunch of quitters who have let their distaste for the coach and adversity in Cup play blind them into an obsessive suicidal run. They deserve to get bounced, the whole bunch of them.

C’est la vie, losers.]