Antonetti didn’t want to “impose” Sadio Diallo

Sadio Diallo will join the Stade Rennais next summer. Until then, the Guinean international is finishing the season with SC Bastia, with which he is fighting for promotion to Ligue 1.

In L’Équipe today, a laudatory portrait is made of the Bastia player, who scored six goals and gave two assists this season as a playmaker. Questioned about him, Frédéric Antonetti discusses the career of a player he had brought on trial at Nice and tyhen at Rennes in 2009, before he eventually left to Corsica.
«It was Abdoul Bangoura, an agent I know because he used to play in Bastia, who advised me to test this player. So I brought him to Nice, the manager remembers. But then I left to Rennes”. At the « Gym », Diallo’s trial was conclusive but no agreement could be found between the parties. As a result, the Guinean went on for another trial, this time at la Piverdière.

According to the newspaper, it was the “management of the Rennes Academy” who stopped the recruitment of the player, on the reason that the club “already had that type of profile in the squad”. “Since I had only just arrived, I didn’t want to impose Diallo”, Antonetti justifies. But the coach was seduced and directed him towards his former club, SC Bastia. “I called Pierre-Paul Antonetti, my nephew. […] I told him there was no way we could let him disappear”.

Three years later, Sadio Diallo will return to Brittany in style. And he will try to justify the praise received from his various managers. Frédéric Hantz, his mentor in Bastia, affirms that Diallo is « Always capable of flashes of brilliance, to win a game for us ». As for Michel Dussuyer, the national coach of Guinea, he is convinced that Diallo « has got all it takes to go to the top », whether it is as a playmaker or on a wing. “Very honestly, in his gestures, very simple, he reminds me of Zinedine Zidane, and I am deadly serious”, the manager dares to say.

- Photo : SC Bastia