Saturday 18th May ko 18:00

Championnat National 3 Groupe E

RACING CLUB DE CALAIS 3 (Merien 6 Sylla 14og Knockhaert 58)

STADE DE REIMS II 1 (Diadeie 47)

Att c500 at Stade de l’Épopée

Free Entry

I must admit, a trip to France wasn’t on my list of priorities for the end of the 24/25 football season, but sometimes a random conversation changes everything. Here the conversation was between Robyn and Chris Garrett (he’s a weatherman) at the hop game at Newquay. He’d spotted a fairly random game at Racing Club Calais on a Saturday evening making it straightforward enough to get there and back via the Channel Tunnel in a day.

There was a lot to like about that idea, for one thing Robyn had never experienced the Channel Tunnel, and her sole trip to France had been a school day-trip to Boulogne from Bristol that consisted of hours sat on a bus and minutes in the actual town itself! I’ll always wonder how much booze the teachers brought back?!

Booking the Tunnel was and is straightforward enough, a day trip worked out at £70 return, but do check your passports have 6 months or more left on them and if you’re driving do check what you’ll need to drive legally on French roads. The packs available at the terminal are a rather expensive fall back! Other than that Eurotunnel is so efficient it’s actually quite dull. Just drive on to the train, and 40 minutes later you’re in France. You will find yourself favourably comparing the service to air travel.

I was determined not to allow the trip to be just about football. There was an oddity concerning Augustin Rodin’s famous 1889 sculpture of the “Burghers of Calais.” It sits outside the Hotel de Ville, and is an icon of the city. It was wonderful to see the piece close up but the catch was I’d seen it before, would you believe in Tokyo? I’d seen a 1959 casting at the National Museum of Western Art in Ueno Park, back in 2011! I’m sure you can imagine how taken aback I’d been when I saw it all those years ago!

We had a quite lovely French lunch before heading north towards the stadium, but stopped at the Stade Julien-Denis. The ground was home to Calais Racing Union until their move to the new Stade de l’Épopée in 2008. I’m told RC Calais use the ground for reserve and youth games these days, and if anyone can find me an accurate fixture list, I’d be more than interested in going!

Our match did come with an odd issue, it was as simple as to say “what does free entry actually mean?” We knew that that RC Calais were offering free entry this season, and that they’d be relegated from France’s 5th tier, but was that simply an open door policy, or did that entail collecting a free ticket from somewhere along the lines of the opening game at Manchester City’s Academy Stadium? We rushed round the wine warehouse featured on “Only Fools & Horses”, (remember Gary?) but then discovered on arrival at Stade de l’Épopée that the doors were open for all, and the rush was entirely unnecessary!

The word Épopée translates as Epic, in the sense of Homer’s Odyssey is an epic poem. It refers to Calais Racing Union’s 2000 run in the Coupe de France. They made it through 10 rounds to the final, as a fourth division side losing to Nantes at the Stade de France, an amazing feat. It showed just how unsuitable the Stade Julien-Denis was; in fact many of the games had been played at Lens’ Stade Bollaert-Delelis. A further cup run in 2006 saw games being played at Stade de la Libération, home to US Boulogne. Imagine how you’d feel if your club were forced to play home games at your bitterest rival?

The 12,000 capacity Stade de l’Épopée opened in 2008 but by 2017 Calais RU were bankrupt, with the current Racing Club Calais being a 2023 merger between Calais FC Hauts-de-France and Grand Calais Pascal. The stadium has been kept busy over and above Calais football, a women’s international between France and Spain took place in 2017, and it has twice hosted the French women’s cup final, in 2015 and 2025, 2 weeks prior to this game!

It is a supremely well thought out ground, the clever bit being how the place can be configured in many ways to suit the type of crowd that’s likely to be there. In fact the only real issue concerned the club itself. That was, sad to say RC Calais were doomed to relegation to regional football and would finish next to bottom no matter what happened here- their final game of the season.

I expected to walk into a wake, and the fact that I didn’t was down in no small part to the efforts of the BNC 23 ultras behind the goal. They caught me sneaking a photo, but invited me over, and presented me with a scarf, and told me a little about themselves! All the best to them, I know all about cheering your club on even though they’ve been relegated, and at least Racing Club gave them a win to sign off the season.

As for us, we dashed back to the tunnel and were heading back to England before the players had finished their showers! Such is the efficiency of Eurotunnel.