Laurent Blanc faces tough task as France woe continues against Belarus

France's new manager problems mounted at the Stade de France, with injuries, suspensions and a fourth straight defeat
Laurent Blanc
France's coach, Laurent Blanc, oversaw another poor performance by Les Bleus against Belarus. Photograph: Charles Platiau/Reuters

France continue to be European football's greatest source of merriment after a miserable Friday evening in Paris when Laurent Blanc's competitive bow as head coach ended in a 1-0 humiliation by Belarus in their opening Euro 2012 qualifier.

That was a fourth consecutive defeat for the national team, a sequence that has not happened since 1937, but this was hardly surprising given what France have offered since Thierry Henry's handball in the second leg of their World Cup play-off against the Republic of Ireland in November.

Now they face a difficult trip to Sarajevo to face Bosnia and Herzegovina on Tuesday. Lose that one and qualification for the finals will still be possible in a group that also includes Luxembourg, Romania and Albania, but it will hardly be the shiny new world demanded by fans following their shambolic World Cup in South Africa.

"We're in a difficult situation and we need to fight, which is exactly what we will do," Blanc said after the Belarus defeat. "When you're young, you make mistakes. Our problem is we cannot afford to make any."

Blanc's deeper problem is the malaise inherited from his predecessor, Raymond Domenech, and the squad the eccentric coach fell out with in comic manner in South Africa, which ended in a player strike and led to the suspensions of Jérémy Toulalan (one match), Patrice Evra (five), Franck Ribéry (three) and Nicolas Anelka (an international career-ending 18).

Having replaced Domenech, Blanc made a decision that may have done little for building a fresh team spirit: demanding that the 23-man World Cup squad be suspended for the friendly against Norway last month, which France lost.

Now Blanc also has injury and on-field-related suspensions to deal with ahead of Tuesday's match. Without the suspended playmaker Yoann Gourcuff and Arsenal's injured Samir Nasri against Belarus, the coach was forced to field an inexperienced team that entered to applause at the Stade de France but exited to jeers after Sergei Kislyak's 86th-minute winner.

The only established performers were Arsenal's Bacary Sagna, Abou Diaby and Gaël Clichy, and Florent Malouda of Chelsea, who led the team in Evra's absence. With only Toualan of the "World Cup four" available for selection against Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Louis Saha and fellow forward Loïc Rémy injured against Belarus, Blanc is facing a stiff test of his managerial smarts.

"Nothing works in our favour at the moment with all those injuries: it's difficult to find anything positive in a defeat but there were things in our game that I liked," he said.

But after the insipid 90 minutes that had the Stade de France howling at their team, Yuri Zhevnov, the Belarus captain and goalkeeper, gave a more worrying verdict: "I didn't have so much work to do. This is a new beginning for the French team, and our coach kept telling us they might be vulnerable. He was right."