INTERVIEW. “Tarbes will be champion of France”, before the final against Basket Landes, Isabelle Yacoubou sees the TGB winning a second title

Isabelle, fifteen years ago, the TGB was champion of France by defeating Bourges. What is the feeling left?

Already at the time, we were very proud to succeed the Tzekova-Savasta generation. Today, for me, it is a feeling that is that of the work accomplished. At the time, I had a heritage to which I made all its letters of nobility, I honored these girls because they had managed to achieve, I helped in 2010 my team to register the name of each of us in the history of the TGB, and today, it is really the feeling of completing this loop. My return to Tarbes to end my career there, with this ambition to bring back a club descended in LF2, which often returned to Play-Down, with important sporting difficulties. The project was to come back, to fill the room again because I had been told: “There is no one in the room, it’s sad”. So bring back basketball to Tarbes, and then two, with my experience and my skills, be able to bring victory and the taste for performance because when you are athlete, we like it, win titles, bring the victory to Tarbes. Today, I have the feeling that the project ends in one way or another by the qualification of this team in the final, a final that I dreamed three years ago when I left Bourges.

These finals are always special …

It allows you to write the history of the club a little more when you win. But does it mark the story if you lose? Unfortunately, we remember that the winner. But today, I want to say, I hope people will have the courage and a little sweetness in their hearts only to see victory, but also to see the course. The course of this club, I repeat, when I arrived in 2021-2022, we did the Play-Down. It is a club that returns from afar, which every year over the past fifteen years passes in correction, the management control commission has a file on Tarbes which, I suppose, is long as the arm. Each year it is difficulties in ending the season, each year it is difficulties in keeping the young people that we form who prefer to go on more solid and reassuring projects. The desire is to register in a club which offers this framework to players so that they can project themselves not only to come here as a springboard, but that we come there to build the reputation of this club at the highest level. And I believe that today, the accession to this final, even if it is lost next week, allows you to register the club in this rank, in the category of clubs where people want to come to stay there, to perpetuate values. And that for me, it has much more weight than just winning a title because a title you can win it, but if you only win it every fifteen years, the impact is much less important. When we see clubs like Bourges who won for a long time, it is not the same story as Tarbes who earns every fifteen years.

If we come back to this Tarbaise team, we know it capable of beautiful surprises, but it was the outsider on the starting line of these play-offs?

So, at the start of the season, when we start, I remember that I tell François, “with this team, we are in the first four and if we arrive in the final we are champion of France”. He looked at me and said to me, “Well yes, I believe in it too …”. That is to say, the team was built in such a way where we had experience, youth, girls in the age of age like Endy who has an extraordinary season with just enormous performances, girls like Camille drugstore who will unfortunately leave but who are in full spring. We knew that our weak point was on the position of leader, and I want to pull my hat to Nancy Fora who thwarted all the forecasts. She left to be a second leader, she not only became number one, but she grew up as a player, and today, without her, the team does not turn in the same way. There is an individual work done at this level which is just exceptional. This final, suddenly, is surprising when we see the career of the regular season, but I, she did not surprise me given the potential I saw, with François, in this team at the start of the season.

Having beaten Bourges, overthrew Charleville, is it necessarily playing in the heads at the time of playing a final?

Absolutely and it is not trivial. But for me, which will play the most, beat Bourges once, limit we are surprised to have beat him, but having reiterated this year came to consolidate a confidence that missed last year, and which perhaps prevented us from going further. We were so happy to have beaten Bourges that we fell thinking that the final had already taken place against Bourges. But there, the team grew up, this group was able to draw the experience of the players who were there but not that, to understand that the victory against Bourges was not an accomplishment but a stage to go towards something bigger, and I believe that this group arrived at maturity in this sense.

There are 1-1 in the championship, there, and unlike the quarter and a half, we leave for the best of three games. Is it going to be an open final for you?

The final is more than open when you look again at the performances of the two teams again. On the championship, even I give basketball moors winning, but when we look since the start of the play-offs the quality of basketball produced by the TGB, I can say in my soul and conscience that I put all the cards on Tarbes because not only were they able to improve when it is necessary, and that is the brand of the great champions, but also to be able to keep the euphoria and to be concentrated. Their victory in Charleville of almost 30 points shows him for me. On the basketball side Landes, we attended a little more laborious quarter and semi-finals, and the feeling for me, as a spectator, just something a little more rough and less mastered than the basketball that the Tarbaises offer today.

So if you had to play predictions, would you play Tarbes?

Tarbes champion of France, yes.

Next week, at the end of the finals, it is Endy Miyem who could end up on a title, no longer with Bourges but with Tarbes?

Of course. Endy, last summer, when we started to chat with her and I call her, I say to her: “This is what you miss, come and win a title in Tarbes”. And I would even like to go back two years, and recall when I left Bourges, I had a discussion with Pauline Astier and Laetitia Guapo saying “in three years Tarbes will be champion of France, and if you want to win, it is now that you have to come”, and they laughed. But in fact, it is not by chance. It is a work that has since been done, the work of bringing the public back in the room, the work of intelligently building the teams, of offering a basketball that pleases, even with more liberated players to express themselves in the field. So Endy comes this year to taste this, to end her career on this. I can only be proud of her career, to have been able to share the field with her, and not only in the French team but in a club too, whether in Italy or on my way to Bourges. Coming to finish in Tarbes, I hope she lives it in the most manner. That is to say that there is not for me a more beautiful way to end your career. You can still be on the field and come and play the finals for a title. It is the Grail, as in the theater die on stage. I am super happy for my friend, that she can live these feelings. I also know that she is already projected in the after, but here, if I had only one thing to say to her, it is to enjoy because she will have finished like a queen, quite simply.