Absent, as he has been for 18 months now, from France’s internationals, Paul Pogba took the opportunity of last week’s international pause to give a rare interview.
Opening up to Al Jazeera, he reflected on some of the difficulties in a challenging year professionally and personally: “Sometimes I was by myself, thinking ‘I don’t want to play any more'," he said to camera.
Barely had the interview been broadcast when Italy’s Anti-Doping Agency announced that the World Cup-winning midfielder, who has played 91 times for France, had returned a positive test for synthetic testosterone in a routine doping sample taken after the opening game of the Serie A season at Udinese, where Pogba had been a non-playing substitute for his club, Juventus.
He is provisionally suspended with immediate effect, pending the results of a second examination of the sample. If Pogba is found to have intentionally doped, he faces a four-year ban.