Group C

Age does not seem to spook Lilian Thuram in the way it can do some veteran sportsmen. He does not talk about making up for a lost yard of pace with the savvy acquired over almost two decades as a professional and when he says he feels much as he did at 25 or 30, he qualifies it by reminding you he means that even 10 years ago there would be mornings when he woke up and his body moaned: “No more!”

He seems at ease with his 36 years. He talks about his children as if they were young adults from whom he learns as often as he teaches, and having once retired from international football, regretted it and reversed the decision, regards the closing of his career as an event not to put too firm a date on. A safe assumption would be that if his 147th international cap ends with the presentation of a gold medal, he might be content to let it be his last outing with Les Bleus. It would mean France had not only come through Euro 2008’s so-called Group of Death (they are pitted against Italy, Holland and Romania in Group C), but that he had made the second European Championship final of a record-breaking career, giving him a trio of victories at major tournaments.

Nobody has played more times for France and only two outfield players have played more often for any European country. Uniquely, Thuram’s career has coincided almost exactly with the finest decade and a half in the history of Les Bleus. You get some sense of the epic reach of Thuram’s experience when you recall he made his debut in a team captained by Eric Cantona, with David Ginola on the left wing on a night when he preceded a young lad named Zinedine Zidane to international honours by some 62 minutes. In the remaining 28 minutes, Zidane scored twice.

In the intervening 14 years and 139 matches, Thuram has also scored twice for France. He is a defender, a versatile enough one to have shared his career between full-back and centre-half, but a defender’s defender. The two goals, though, were heroic ones, minutes apart as France trailed Croatia in the semi-final of the World Cup in Paris. A match later, they were world champions. Two summers later, they had added the championship of Europe.

A strong thread of success binds Thuram at centre-back to Patrick Vieira in midfield to Thierry Henry at centre-forward in the team that will line up at Euro 2008. That loyalty has its sceptics: all of them have arrived at summers in higher peaks of form. At Barcelona, the club Thuram has just left awaiting his next job, the defender did not make the first XI for their important Champions League semi-finals against Manchester United. Henry’s first season at Barça finished with the Frenchman as the club’s leading scorer but he, too, had been in and out of the side. As had Vieira, often because of injury, at the Italian champions, Internazionale.

Thuram acknowledges that Barça have paced him through his last season, but says he feels ready for the concentrated examinations of tournament football. “Experience and age should never become an excuse for less work, but you have to organise yourself intelligently,” he says. Of the intelligence of Thuram’s approach to most things, there is little room for doubt. This is a footballer admired not only in his own field, but a way beyond. He is not a sportsman hanging on at the top because he wonders what he could possibly do when the final whistle blows. He does plenty as it is, and is frequently asked to do more in the milieu of politics and humanitarianism.

Thuram’s work in the struggle against racism has had an impact in all the countries he has played — at Monaco in France, at Parma and Juventus in Italy, in Spain with Barça — and his status as an articulate spokesman for France’s marginalised communities has brought him into direct conflict with the French government. He is a member of France’s High Council on Integration; there are sections of French society, its non-football public, who recognise Thuram more readily than they would Henry, know the bespectacled, intellectual rather than the towering centre-half.

As a black Frenchman associated with a notably mixed, and achieving national team, he feels a strong sense of responsibility. “The France team, winning the World Cup, showed a very positive face and some players became very well known,” he says. “People asked the question, thought about why the French team looks like it does, and the history provides a simple answer: the legacies of colonisation and slavery mean today we have a multi-cultural French national team and France is a multi-cultural country. Some of the great advances in terms of integrating minorities have been made through sport.”

He’s not all earnest. Thuram has an engaging sense of self-deprecation. He recalls how somebody wrote him a letter just after his 30th birthday telling him: “You’ll be okay, you’ve always been old!” He recounts how his sons, Marcus and Kephren, used to ask him from time to time to see tapes of the 1998 World Cup final; “Now,” he laughs, “they just love watching Cristiano Ronaldo.”

He approaches his last big tournament with no excess of nostalgia, and braced for what cannot be a slow, gradual build-up. After all, he has to face Romania, Holland and, the stand-out game, Italy. Familiarity cannot dull the edge of France-Italy matches, not since the 2006 World Cup final, not since France’s emphatic answer to that defeat in Berlin on penalties when they won 3-1 in Paris in the qualifiers for Euro 2008. And not with all the long relationship Thuram has with Italian football.

He spent a decade there, which he says was the making of him as a defender. He holds the record transfer fee for any defensive player in Serie A — £22m when he joined Juve from Parma in 2001 — and he says his years there “enriched me as a player”.

“You learn at the Italian school and that means something,” he says. “Every player there is impregnated with a sense of where he belongs on the field and they have the culture of playing the big games. Les Bleus had some of it in 1998 and 2000 because a lot of us played there then. France against Italy, it’s special for all of us.”