
Norway newlywed Bizet loving Swiss Euro 'honeymoon'
Following a fairytale wedding on the shores of Italy's Lake Como, the bubbly 23-year-old came on in her country's 2-1 opening win over hosts Switzerland on Wednesday and almost got the perfect wedding present but her effort flew just wide.
"It's hard to sometimes organise when to have stuff like weddings but we thought in the next five years everything can happen and obviously he's on the national team too and if they go to a tournament, it's going to be for how long?" Bizet told Reuters of the decision to get married so close to the Euros.
"But it was no stress, to be fair, it was all chilled and nice and a lovely place in Italy, and I had the best days of my life."
With husband Aron playing for Toulouse in France and Celine having completed a busy season in the Women's Super League with Manchester United, the crammed football calendar leaves little time for long-distance relationships, let alone weddings.
"I think I'm kind of used to it. It's my life, it's my husband's life. He's two days off and then training again, or two weeks off on holiday and then straight to training," she said.
"So I think we're very used to it, and it's not like we're not going to have our honeymoon (very soon), it's going to be in the future, so I'm looking forward to that."
To ensure they could remain focused on their football, the couple enlisted the services of a wedding planner to sort out the logistics of hosting around 80 guests who were present when they tied the knot, and Bizet laughed off the suggestion that she might have wanted to control everything in great detail.
"We had the wedding planner so we didn't do much to be fair, we just sat down and were just saying yes or no to flowers or bouquets or a boat or this and that. So no, not a control freak and was just chilled, just saying yes or no to messages, so it was nice," she said.
For now, husband Aron is staying close to Norway's base in Neuchatel but the winger will soon be heading back to France for pre-season training, while his new wife keeps her sights firmly set on Norway's Euro campaign.
"It's like a normal thing in football, I think, it's life -- someday we'll finish with football and we can be together every day, so I'm not taking it hard, it's life. Everyone does it," she said.
Bizet suggested that, when the time comes, the pair might go on a safari for their honeymoon, but Norway are looking to qualify for next year's men's World Cup in the United States, with Aron likely to be part of the squad if they make it.
Bizet is looking no further than Norway's next game at the Euros, but she allowed herself to look at photos and Instagram posts from their special day before the tournament got under way.
"It was more (than I dreamed it could be). Nothing went wrong. Everyone had the best time, the vibes, the music, my husband. Everything was just perfect," Bizet recalled.
"It's cliche, but it was the most perfect day of my life."
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The Guardian
an hour ago
- The Guardian
France seeking end to years of hurt and internal conflicts at Euro 2025
'I want people to stop asking me: 'Why haven't France won anything when you're one of the best teams in the world?'' Marie-Antoinette Katoto, like all her teammates, has only one dream this summer: to win the Euros. To do that, though, they have to come to terms with a history of tournament failures with the most recent one coming at the home Olympics last year, when they were knocked out by Brazil at the quarter-final stage. 'We have had opportunities and twice failed to win it at home in France. We have to have the humility to admit that,' admits Sakina Karchaoui, one of the team's vice-captains, referring also to the 2019 World Cup on home soil, when they lost to the USA in the quarter-finals. The list of failures is so long that the word 'finally' is added to any question about Les Bleues' chances. France have only managed to reach the semi-finals of a major women's competition on three occasions: the 2011 World Cup, the 2012 Olympic Games and Euro 2021. Repeated disappointments have taken a toll. 'Since we prepare for tournaments a year or two years in advance, when you arrive at the competition and you get eliminated quickly, yes, at some point it also has an impact on the mind,' says Grace Geyoro. 'It can be exhausting, especially when you see the [quality in the] team we have.' On Saturday, they start their latest mission at Euro 2025 against England in Zurich. It could not have been a tougher opening, the Lionesses having the last Euros in 2022 with a coach who also won the previous tournament, in 2019 with the Netherlands. The Dutch are also in France's group in Switzerland, together with Wales. France have always had individual quality. As far as the 2000s there have been players such as Louisa Nécib Cadamuro, Camille Abily, Marie-Laure Delie, Sandrine Soubeyrand and Laura Georges, before the arrival of Eugénie Le Sommer and Wendie Renard. All of which begs the question: Why haven't France triumphed in a major tournament. 'If we knew why France weren't winning, I think we'd have put things right by now,' says Abily, the fifth-most capped player in Les Bleues history with 183 caps between 2001 and 2017. 'I think there's a tendency in France to see football as an individual sport, thinking more about oneself before thinking about the team. That's what's been a bit lacking in the French team.' Grace Geyoro agrees: 'We've relied a lot on individuals, on the fact that one player can make the difference. Now we need to focus more on the collective, because we can only win together.' The team has often been shaken by internal conflicts, whether it be disagreements with the coach Corinne Diacre or players clashing such as Kheira Hamraoui and Aminata Diallo in 2021. Elise Bussaglia, who earned 192 caps between 2003 and 2019, says: 'The group hasn't always coped well, for various reasons. And it's true that at one point it could have had a detrimental effect on our results.' One of the areas of tension was the disconnect between the players from Lyon, who were professionals at the time, and those from Juvisy (later Paris FC) and Paris Saint-Germain, who were still semi-professional. The current Chelsea head coach, Sonia Bompastor, touches on the subject in her book Une vie de foot, which was published this year, writing: 'We weren't on the same wavelength at all, and we didn't have the same conception of what it meant to be a footballer. For me, losing a match was the end of the world; not for them.' Abily, who is Bompastor's assistant at Chelsea, insists that in her day, the team 'didn't realise' the quality it had. 'I remember that when we qualified for the semi-finals of the World Cup in 2011, we said to ourselves: 'Wow! That's great, we're here, we've qualified!' Bussaglia, who finished fourth with France at the 2011 World Cup and the following year's Olympics, adds: 'There are times when the French team should have at least won a medal, if not the title, and it didn't happen. There needs to be a bit more of a winning culture. But it's not just the federation, it's everyone: the players, the staff, the fans, everyone. Around this French team, there's still not enough desire to win.' Bompastor has also spoken about the lack of interest from the French FA in the women's team in the past. 'Nobody gave a damn about the French women's team,' she wrote in her book. 'We used to go and see Noël Le Graët, the president of the federation, to explain to him that the reason Lyon were European champions was because we'd put certain processes in place, and not because we'd gone off to summer camps with a singing coach [referring to Bruno Bini, Les Bleues coach from 2007 to 2013 who wrote songs for the players]. The only thing that mattered to him was our popularity rating and our good image.' There was a feeling by some players that the French FA was using the women's team to restore its reputation after the catastrophic 2010 World Cup when the men's team went on strike and refused to train by staying on the team bus. A lack of ambition is no longer true today, says Eric Blahic, who was assistant coach to Corinne Diacre and then Hervé Renard (2023-24) and was delighted to see the latter end the 'famous semi-final complex'. 'For years, the girls were told that they had to be in the sem-finals,' he says. 'That doesn't mean anything. Third or fourth is not the same thing. You have to say: the objective is the final.' He also rejects the idea that France have failed to go all the way because of a mental block. 'In 1982, when the French men's team played in the semi-final in Seville, when we led 3-1 and ended up being eliminated, people were already saying that it was mental problems. If that's all it was, the federation would have taken action a long time ago.' Laurent Bonadei was appointed as Renard's successor in August 2024 and since then a full-time mental performance coach, Thomas Sammut, has been part of the team 'to break this glass ceiling'. He has made other changes too, dropping three key players – Le Sommer, Renard and Kenza Dali – just before the Euros, saying that 'if it doesn't work you have to try something new'. Bonadei will also have to deal with Les Bleues' misfortune when it comes to penalties in major tournaments. Bussaglia says of the Olympics semi-final defeat to Japan in 2012: 'At the Olympics, in the semi-final, we were 2-1 down and I missed the penalty to make it 2-2. I'd never missed a penalty in my life but I missed that one.' Blahic, meanwhile, recalls the shootout loss to Australia in the 2023 World Cup, when Kenza Dali missed her spot kick against club teammate Mackenzie Arnold not once but twice as it was retaken. 'All the girls had taken lots of penalties in training, in all different forms, against three different goalkeepers,' he explains. Bonadei prefers to refer to France as 'outsiders' rather than favourites, despite having won their eight last games going into the tournament. 'Confidence is good for developing our game, but overconfidence is the trap that awaits us,' warns Bonadei. In Switzerland there is unlikely to be overconfidence as France have to battle against not only their opponents, but their past too.


BBC News
an hour ago
- BBC News
Ready for Euro 2025? Take our quiz
All eyes are on stunning Switzerland, as 16 teams battle it out to win Euro 2025, including Wales and defending champions England. But how much do you know about the tournament? Take our quiz and limber up for the football event of the summer. Written and produced by: Text Formats and Special Projects teams Designs by: Dan HagueImage credit: Getty Images


Times
2 hours ago
- Times
The ‘Untalented Mr Ripley' accused of double murder
A Hollywood fraudster who fooled the Italian government into funding a non-existent film is at the centre of a real-life murder investigation after he was accused of killing his partner and daughter. Francis Charles Kaufmann, 46, fled from Italy to the Greek island of Skiathos after the discovery of the bodies in a park in Rome last month. He has been arrested and awaits extradition. He is, according to the Italian magistrate Flavia Costantini, 'a highly skilled criminal'. The hunt for Kaufmann started on June 7 when the body of Anastasia Trofimova, a 28-year-old Russian, was found hidden in the bushes in Villa Pamphili park. Trofimova is likely to have died of suffocation. Nearby, the body of her 11-month-old daughter was found, possibly strangled. Witnesses had seen the mother and daughter sleeping rough in the park with a man who had also been spotted drunkenly wandering with them around the centre of Rome, and who was identified during a police check as Rexal Ford. This was later found to be a fake name used by the American. The man's final encounter with police was on June 5, when he was seen walking without the woman but carrying the baby in one arm and a bottle of wine in the other. Officers let him go, although investigators suspect Trofimova may have already been dead by then, and the infant had hours left to live. Kaufmann, a Californian, had posed as a film producer in Rome to obtain €863,595 in tax credits from the Italian culture ministry for a film that was never made. The head of the ministry's film department resigned over the incident this week. Using another alias — Matteo Capozzi — Kaufmann claimed to have worked with the American director Clint Eastwood and on the 2017 Ridley Scott film All the Money in the World, which has been denied by the production. Investigators realised they were searching for a fraudster whose life increasingly resembled the film and novel The Talented Mr Ripley, in which an American con artist invents his past and goes on a killing spree in Italy. Kaufmann is said to have met Trofimova while she was on holiday in Malta in 2023. Their daughter was born last summer. Since Trofimova's tourist visa had expired, Kaufmann chartered a yacht to take them to Sicily to avoid customs upon entering Italy. Once in Rome, Kaufmann tried to broker new film deals but appears to have run out of money. When his real name emerged, the Italian daily newspaper La Repubblica tracked down his sister in Los Angeles, who claimed Kaufmann was a dangerous con man. 'Charlie was brilliant, he had a way with people,' she told the newspaper. 'He knew how to empathise immediately. When he lived in Los Angeles he would go to dinner with Hollywood directors, with famous musicians. He knew hundreds of stars of the entertainment world.' Even though he studied film he had only been involved in a few productions, she added. 'He would be capable of selling you your own clothes. He has always been brilliant, handsome, with thousands of women flocking after him,' she said. 'At home we called him the Untalented Mr Ripley.' He also had a dark side, she claimed. 'He is violent, especially when he drinks or takes drugs. His brain goes blank, he cannot manage his anger. He becomes a monster.' She added that after attacking one of his brothers, he changed his name to Rexal Ford and left the US. Italian magistrates have reported that Kaufmann was arrested for assault five times in the US and had spent 120 days in jail. On June 5, the day he was spotted by police with Andromeda, Kaufmann left a voice mail for an Italian contact, claiming Trofimova had left him for a richer man, leaving him with the baby. 'Unfortunately, she is not seeing the big future,' he said, adding: 'Whatever it is, it's all good.' On June 11 Kaufmann took a Ryanair flight to Skiathos and was arrested two days later. He will be brought back to Rome for interrogation next week. In a video conference with an Italian magistrate, he said: 'I am innocent, I didn't kill them.' He also accused the Italian police of being 'mafiosi'. Writing in the arrest warrant, Costantini accused Kaufmann of strangling his daughter, describing it as an act of 'instinctive cruelty' that revealed 'the extreme dangerousness of the man'.