Leboeuf - remains defiant (Allsport)

Click here to place your World Cup bets!
Click here for France team section
Click here for teams index
Click here for latest World Cup headlines
Click here for World Cup photo gallery
Click here for World Cup Bettingzone

As France mourns the traumatic downfall of Les Bleus, a defiant Frank Leboeuf insists it was simply a case of their luck running out.

The veteran France defender has been made a scapegoat by a nation struggling to make sense of their team's near unbelievable fall from grace - world champs to chumps in a matter of days.

But as 34-year-old Leboeuf sees it, the wind just switched.

"I tell myself that we had an enormous amount of luck to become world champions, European champions and Confederation Cup winners," he said on his personal website, www.frankleboeuf.com.

"But over the last week the wind has changed. I say to myself that we are cursed with all these elements of bad luck building up."

Leboeuf, who announced his retirement from international football following the failure of the reigning world champions to even make it past the first round this time, said the criticism would not hurt him.

"I don't listen to it and I do not need that to have an opinion of my game - on whether I was good or not. I don't need the press for that," he said.

"I've turned a page and I will end my career with 'Les Bleus'. During all these years I have really performed and it's not that I will keep in my memory. It is those extraordinary things that I experienced over the last seven years."

"We had the desire to do well and we realised that we did not succeed to represent ourselves well in this World Cup.

"We achieved three wonderful things in three years with a World Cup title, a European Championship title and the Confederations Cup.

"Today, it is certainly the end of a beautiful story and I think we'll only take the positives with us.

"What we experienced in South Korea was very hard because we always had the ambition and will to do beautiful things for ourselves, the country and the supporters who we are thinking of.

"We wanted to make them dream again and today those people are also sad.

"We did not qualify and we have to accept that."