Lille 0-0 Nice: Ligue 1 Match Report

Lille 0-0 Nice produced no goals in either half — and given what Lille had been doing to teams, that is the surprise of the round rather than a dull afternoon dismissed. The home side had won their previous four and scored eleven across them: 2-1 at Rennes, 2-1 at Marseille, 3-0 against Lens, 4-0 at Toulouse. Then nothing.

Lille were third on 53 points from 29 matches with a goal difference of +15, ten behind PSG at the top and nine behind Lens, with Marseille a point behind them and Lyon two. Nice were 15th on 28 with -22, four points above Auxerre in 16th and with a record that had gone badly wrong: 0-4 at home to Rennes, 0-4 at home to PSG, 1-3 at Strasbourg, and a 1-1 at Le Havre in their previous match.

Nice had also won the reverse meeting 2-0 in October, which was the one piece of evidence pointing towards a difficult afternoon for the hosts. On everything else — form, position, goal difference, the four-match winning run — this looked like the most one-sided fixture on the card.

Lille moved to 54 points with the goal difference unchanged at +15, holding third but dropping two points in a home fixture their rivals would have expected them to take. In a division where four clubs were covered by four points in the chase for European places, a goalless draw against a side in the bottom five costs more than the table shows.

Nice reached 29 with -22, a point taken at the ground of the third-placed side and enough to keep five clear of 16th with four rounds to play. A team that had conceded four twice in the same month keeping a clean sheet at Lille is the most useful ninety minutes of their spring, and they got it in the fixture where nobody expected it.

Our pre-match call was Lille Win at 1.85. It failed, and the price already reflected more doubt than we gave it credit for — 1.85 for a third-placed side on a four-match winning run against opposition in 15th is the market flagging something. That something was probably the 2-0 in the reverse fixture, and possibly the fact that Nice's heavy defeats had come against Rennes and PSG rather than against sides in Lille's bracket. Backing a team in form to keep it going is a reasonable instinct. It is not an edge, and this is what it costs when a run ends. Verdict: lost