Wide-Eyed Les Herbiers Dream of Ultimate Giant-Killing Feat Against Might of PSG
On Tuesday evening, Matthieu Pichot will take his place in the changing room and go through his usual pre-match routine. Kit, shin pads, boots, goalie gloves. Sebastien Flochon, the team captain, on one side and right-back Romuald Marie on the other. Marie is usually in charge of the playlist—a mix of rap and modern classics to keep everyone happy—but Pichot will put his headphones on and listen to his own music.
The last song he will put on before going out to warm up is always the same: the official anthem of Roma, the club he has supported since falling in love with Rome on a trip to the city as a youngster. "Roma, Roma, Roma," go the words, written by singer/songwriter Antonello Venditti, a Rome native. "One hundred thousand voices/You made us fall in love."
Ordinarily, there is a major disconnect between the scenes of majesty described by Venditti and the sight that greets Pichot when he emerges from the tunnel at Stade Massabielle, home to Les Herbiers, a French amateur team whose average home gate is around 1,500.
But on Tuesday evening, he will walk out in front of some 75,000 people at Stade de France to take on Paris Saint-Germain, one of the most expensively assembled teams in the history of football, in the final of the Coupe de France.
Pichot will be the last line of defence for his team against PSG's star-studded attack of Edinson Cavani, Kylian Mbappe and Angel Di Maria. He is anticipating a busy night.
"We know how good they are in front of goal," he told Bleacher Report. "It's a great opportunity for me to show that I'm a good goalkeeper."
Pichot, 28, has been one of the symbols of Les Herbiers' improbable journey to the final. He saved a penalty against second-tier Auxerre in the round of 16 and played a starring role as Les Herbiers, the competition's petit poucet ("little thumb"), eliminated Lens—another Ligue 2 side—in a quarter-final penalty shootout, saving two spot-kicks.
Pichot began his career with Laval in Ligue 2, but he dropped out of the professional echelons in search of regular first-team football and has never returned. His story is echoed throughout the squad. Flochon, the skipper, started out at Lyon with the Barcelona and France defender Samuel Umtiti. After tumbling down the French league system, he spent six months on unemployment benefits in 2016 before Les Herbiers offered him a route back into football in January 2017.
"The struggles that every player has been through have served to bring us here," Pichot said. "That's why it's so important to savour moments like this."
Les Herbiers have prepared for the final at Clairefontaine, France's national football centre, as guests of tournament sponsors PMU, a French betting firm.
Nestled in the Forest of Rambouillet south-west of Paris, Clairefontaine was base camp for the France team that won the 1998 World Cup on home soil, giving it hallowed status. Its latest inhabitants made no secret of the sense of awe they felt when their bus pulled up in front of the complex's famous chateau at lunchtime on Sunday.
Sitting on a bench in a Perspex dugout beside the pristine pitch where Didier Deschamps puts his France players through their paces, left-back Adrien Pagerie described the experience as a "dream come true."
"We're not used to training on pitches like this," he said. "Going into the chateau, your eyes are full of stars. We're in the bedrooms of some of the French players. You cannot imagine it."
Veteran midfielder Pierre Germann is staying in the room used by Zinedine Zidane during the 1998 World Cup.
"I breathed in the air, because it was the air that Zizou breathed," he told a press conference in the Clairefontaine auditorium. "Maybe I'll score two goals in the final now."
Pagerie turns 26 on Tuesday. To mark the occasion, he is marking Mbappe.
"Mbappe...he's a future Ballon d'Or," Pagerie said with a nervous laugh. "He moves at 10,000 kilometres an hour. I'll have to be really concentrated from the start to the finish and I'll need help from my team-mates, because one-on-one, it will be very, very difficult. But my parents always taught me that no matter who it is, they're just a human being. I'll do everything to make sure that he gets past me the fewest times possible."
Les Herbiers is a town of around 16,000 inhabitants from the Vendee department on France's west coast. The region is best known for the Puy du Fou amusement park, where lavish and spectacular enactments of historical battles are played out to hordes of spectators. When the Vendee graces the sports pages, it is usually because of the Vendee Globe, the solo, round-the-world yacht race that starts and finishes at Les Sables d'Olonne.
Since Les Herbiers beat Chambly, another team from the third-tier Championnat National, in last month's Coupe de France semi-final at Stade de la Beaujoire in nearby Nantes, football has been the only show in town. Traders have decked out their windows in red and black, the team's colours, and the local authorities have erected pennants and banners in the streets. Visits by the team to schools and local businesses have fanned the fervour. Eighteen thousand fans are expected to make the trip to Saint-Denis, just north of Paris, for the final.
"The whole of Les Herbiers is red and black," mayor Veronique Besse said in a phone call from town hall. "It's the only thing people talk about."
Les Herbiers prides itself on having an unemployment rate of just 4.3 percent, which is one of the lowest in the whole of France, according to Paris Match's Pauline Lallement. But it has taken football to put it on the map.
"I don't think there's a single French person who won't now know the name of the town. and every one of them will be able to locate Les Herbiers on a map of France," Besse said. "Whatever happens now, we've already won the Coupe de France. We've won it in people's hearts."
The local football club was founded in 1919 and adopted its current name, Vendee Les Herbiers Football, in 2006. Backed by 120 local businesses and assisted by over 250 volunteers, the club are guaranteed to make a minimum of €1.5 million from their Coupe de France adventure. Given that their annual budget is €2 million, it is a massive sum of money. (PSG's annual budget, by comparison, is €540 million.)
Les Herbiers are the fifth non-professional team to have reached the Coupe de France final after Nimes in 1996, Calais in 2000, Amiens in 2001 and Quevilly in 2012. The players are not strictly amateurs—they are on "federal contracts" worth between €2,000 and €3,000 a month, meaning that they are not obliged to work elsewhere—but it is not enough to make any of them rich. Neymar, the PSG star who will miss the final through injury, makes more money every hour than Les Herbiers' players do in a month.
The club did not reach the National, the highest division below France's top two professional leagues, until 2015. They are still yet to secure their third-tier status for next season, although a dramatic 3-2 win over Laval in their last outing last Friday—in which they came from 2-0 down—has given them room for error ahead of their final game at Beziers on Friday.
Les Herbiers coach Stephane Masala has only been at the helm since January, having been promoted from his role as an assistant following the dismissal of Frederic Reculeau. He does not possess the necessary qualifications to be a head coach in France, meaning that Les Herbiers must pay a fine of €1,170 after every match. Masala's record of just two defeats in 18 games means that club president Michel Landreau has been happy to take the hits.
"I think it was the right decision," Landreau said, as Pichot is put through a drill by goalkeeping coach Anthony Corre in an adjacent goal. "If it wasn't for Stephane, we wouldn't be here."
Conscious of the rigorous examination that awaits his defence on Tuesday, Masala invited Thierry Anti, coach of the successful Nantes handball team, to work on the team's defensive shape at Clairefontaine on Sunday. Beneath a strong early summer sun, Anti used red and white tape to rope Masala's players together, showing them how a handball team starve their opponents of space in attacking areas by moving across the pitch in a tightly packed swarm.
"If things go as expected," Masala explained, "we won't have the ball and we'll find ourselves on the edge of our own 18-yard box. We thought it would be a bit like handball, where it's all about plugging all the little gaps."
Les Herbiers have managed to reach the final without playing a single team from Ligue 1, meaning that a gigantic leap in quality awaits them in the 8:05 p.m. BST kick-off. Though all four amateur teams to have previously reached the Coupe de France final ended up losing, none went down by more than a goal. If PSG can put seven goals past Monaco, one of their closest rivals in Ligue 1, they could make mincemeat of Les Herbiers.
Masala is unequivocal about his side's chances of pulling off an upset that would rank among the greatest shocks in the history of sport, affirming in a press conference on Sunday that his team have "no chance." But Landreau, who has been club president for 10 years, refuses to abandon all hope.
"I don't want my players to respect Paris Saint-Germain too much. I don't want them to just watch them play. I want them to do what they have to do. The longer we contain Paris, the more our players will grow in confidence," he said.
"We have to dream. In a tiny, tiny corner that is so minuscule and so microscopic that you can't even see it. But if you didn't dream, you wouldn't come and play."
"Dream bigger" might be PSG's slogan, but nobody is dreaming bigger than Les Herbiers.
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