Sunday 1st June 2014 ko 15.00

Ligue du Nord-Pas-de-Calais Division d’Honneur

U.S.F.C. TOURCOING 1 (Nsangou 68)

U.S.L. DUNKERQUE II 0

Att 357

Entry €2

No Programme

Pennant- Comp’ “Because you have travelled a long way”

Sometimes the easiest way to succeed in anything is to simply hitch yourself to a good idea. This was an obvious example, my regular reader will no double recognise Clapton-fan Andy, Lee whose site, Adventures in Football is a goldmine for the hopper, and Peter whose Itinerant Football Watcher site is, I think the gold standard for football blogging. My role in this was little more than take Lee to Folkestone, pick up Andy and park up so as to meet Peter for the trip under the Channel! Whilst the Channel Tunnel will never win awards for aesthetics it is a wonderful feat of engineering, and gets the impatient international hopper to France in 35 minutes! 

From Calais it’s around a 90 minute drive shadowing the Belgian border, aiming for Lille before you head north to the small city of Tourcoing. It forms a small conurbation with itself on the French side, and Mouscron on the Belgian. In fact if the border didn’t swing north here, the whole area, including much of Lille would be Belgian! That feeling of borderlands was evident as Peter’s car travelled along Rue de Gand, the Stadium is called Stade van de Veeagate suggesting Flemish, and if we’d carried on driving for another mile we’d have been in Belgian Mouscron, and Rue de Gand becomes the border between Wallonia and Flanders.

Life seemed a little more straightforward on the French side as we parked up and found a boulangerie for the owner to practice his English on us. Back at the ground I enjoyed procuring teamsheets for the group with a conversation with Match Delegate Claudine Lettelier that stretched my pidjin French to the limit! The request for “Quatre,” copies was just about to produce the comment, “Pourquoi?” (Why?)  when the secretary arrived with the copies, and my mangled syntax abused French ears no more.

In France the pyramid starts with Ligue 1 at the top, below is Ligue 2 then the Championnat National making the third tier. Below that, the leagues regionalise under the Championnat de France Amateur or CFA for short. There’s the CFA1 and CFA2, and in this part of France the Ligue du Nord-Pas-de-Calais fits in below the CFA2 with the Division d’Honneur being the top division.

This fixture was as much a celebration as it was a competitive game, Tourcoing have won the league, and with it promotion back to CFA2 after a period of over 10 years away. It’s a club that has had an interesting in turbulent past, formed in 1898 with the stadium named after one of the founders Charles van de Veegaete. He was notable for being the author of one of the first books on refereeing, “The Referee,” in 1932. The club reached the semi-finals of the Championship of France three times, and won the title in 1910. They are ever-present in the French cup but were merged at liberation in 1945 to form CO Roubaix-Tourcoing, only regaining their independence 12 years later. Since then life has been much more difficult, being relegated three levels since leaving CFA2 in 2002.

However a poster in the clubhouse gives a clue to the club’s main claim to fame. It’s of Yohan Cabaye in his Lille kit, but he played for Tourcoing before switching to Lille at the age of 12.  Ivory Coast international Didier Drogba also played for the club’s nursery set-up, and those two players have proved to have helped the club far more off the field than they ever did on it.

Under FIFA’s “Solidarity Mechanism” 5% of a transfer fee should be divided and paid to a formula to each club responsible for the player’s development from age 12 to 25. I’ve encountered this idea before, most notably in Sweden, where a Mother-Club takes a small percentage of each transfer fee a player attracts. It acts as a reward and an incentive to invest in youth, and Cabaye’s transfer from Newcastle to Paris St Germain netted Tourcoing €50,000 to go with the €93,750 when Drogba moved from Marseille to Chelsea and €12,500 when Cabaye moved from Lille to Newcastle.

Perhaps that’s why the ground is so spick and span with a new set of floodlights, a fine place to spend a Sunday afternoon watching a game. The party atmosphere was everywhere from the children in the stand with their airhorns, supplemented by the older fan with his trumpet, to the players with their hair dye running with their sweat, making a mess of their shocking pink change kit. A start was given to club captain Cedric Leman on the occasion of his final game for the team, his departure after 40 minutes was a beautifully orchestrated, emotional moment.

But let’s say this quietly, for all the noise and celebrations it wasn’t a very good game. The trouble was neither side had anything to play for, even the goal was a comedy of errors. The excellent Kevin Gallo’s reverse pass put substitute Adnan Nasangou clean through. He clearly panicked, but scuffed his shot so badly that Dunkerque keeper Tshianke Kashala mistimed his dive at the forward’s feet. The ball spilled out of his grasp and the ball half-hit, half-scuffed Nasangou’s feet and rather apologetically rolled into the net.

I suppose you score goals like that when you’ve just won the league, and it was hard to begrudge this friendly club both goal and the victory on their special day.