Nottingham Forest reportedly want to bring Paris Saint-Germain’s former Ligue 1 winner Hervin Ongenda to the Championship.
Back in the days when a nouveau riche Paris Saint-Germain were just starting to emerge as the dominant force in French football, Hervin Ongenda looked set to be part of a very bright future at the Parc des Princes.
The former France U21 international was starting to make a real impression behind the scenes in the capital and he didn’t wait around to show his talent in the first team either.
Back in October 2013, Ongenda put the cherry on a 4-0 thrashing of Bastia with a glorious chipped finish. And Laurent Blanc, the manager who kick-started PSG’s monopolisation of the game across the channel, had no qualms about tipping this diminutive forward for very big things.
“Technically, he’s very good. In front of the goal, he is very very very good. And then, I think it has a quality that few players have, that good players have is that he moves well,” France’s 1998 World Cup winning defender told Africa Top Sports.
“He knows in which direction he has to go, to move, to get the ball. So he’s a very interesting player.
“And besides, to do that, you have to have, physically, a big enough engine, and he has a big engine.”
Six years on, Blanc and everyone at PSG will have been disappointed with how Ongenda’s career has panned out. He’s playing in Romania with Botosani these days after difficult spells in Spain and Holland.
Though he could be on the move again with FootMercato claiming that Nottingham Forest want to make Ongenda the latest addition to Sabri Lamouchi’s City Ground revolution.
Can Lamouchi be the first man since Blanc himself to get the best out of this gifted yet increasingly wayward striker?
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