Toulouse 2-2 Monaco: Ligue 1 Match Report

Toulouse 2-2 Monaco was 0-2 down at the interval and level by the end. The second period finished 2-0 to the home side, which makes this the second time in eight days that Monaco had gone into a break with the match in their control and come out of it with a single point.

The first was the 2-2 at home to Auxerre, where they trailed 0-2 at the interval and recovered. This one was the mirror image and cost the same two points. Toulouse were 12th on 37 points from 30 matches with a goal difference of -1; Monaco were seventh on 50 with +7, two points behind Marseille and three behind Rennes in a European chase involving five clubs.

Their earlier form had been excellent — 2-0 over Brest, 2-1 at Lyon, 2-1 against Marseille — before a 1-4 at Paris FC broke it. Toulouse had lost three in a row: 1-3 at PSG, 0-4 at home to Lille, 2-3 at Lens, the last of which they had also led. Monaco had won the reverse fixture 1-0 in October. Nothing about the pre-match numbers suggested a home side capable of recovering two goals.

Monaco reached 51 points and kept the difference at +7, staying seventh with four rounds left and still two points behind Marseille. Two draws in eight days against sides from the lower half is the sort of sequence that decides which side of a European place a club finishes on, and it had cost them four points at precisely the moment the group above was pulling away.

Toulouse moved to 38 with -1, a second consecutive match in which they had scored twice and a first point in four. Their season had nothing riding on it — six places clear of the bottom two, fourteen points off the group chasing Europe — but recovering a two-goal deficit against a side chasing qualification is a better afternoon than most mid-table clubs get in April. Thirteen points divided the two clubs before kick-off and thirteen after, which is the honest accounting of a draw.

Our pre-match call was Monaco Win at 1.90. It failed, and it was the second Monaco selection in eight days to do so. The case was Toulouse's three straight defeats, two of them by three and four goals, against a Monaco side who had beaten Lyon and Marseille inside the month. What it did not price was the one thing the previous fixture had just demonstrated: this Monaco team was not closing matches out. A two-goal half-time lead should have been enough, and for the second match running it was not. Verdict: lost