The round of 16 of the Coupe de France will be played this Tuesday and Wednesday, in the middle of the week, whereas for the last five seasons, this round took place on a weekend. A programming that is regretted by the clubs of the lower divisions of N2 and N3 still in the running, where the players most often have a job in parallel. Without wanting to make an excuse.
This Tuesday evening, the Heurtematte stadium will host the biggest match in the history of SU Dives-Cabourg. The Calvados club (N3) hosts Puy-en-Velay in the round of 16 of the Coupe de France, which plays one division above. 2000 spectators expected, for a match in the middle of the week scheduled at 8:45 p.m. in the multiplex broadcast by beIN Sports.
“For us, playing on a Tuesday as real amateurs, it’s still very, very delicate, especially because we had a championship match on Saturday in Chatou, three days before, which left just Sunday and Monday to recover “There is no real training before our Cup match”, underlines Philippe Clément, the Divais-Cabourgeois coach. “Especially since at Puy, they only play football, which is not the case with us. There is a handicap for amateurs, but we are not in the habit of looking for excuses, so We have to face it.”
Cope, and ensure that each player adapts their schedule to this exceptional event, three weeks after the qualification won against the Réunionnais of Saint-Denis. “For example, I have a player who is a PE teacher in the Paris region, so he was forced to take Monday and Tuesday off,” explains the Normandy coach.
“Other players even wanted to finish their work at 4 or 5 p.m. so as not to waste their day… I ended up explaining to them that it was surely one of the best weeks of their career, especially Tuesday, so that it was worth a day’s work.”
For FC Bourgoin-Jallieu (N3), the round of 16 against Olympique Lyonnais will take place at 6 p.m. this Wednesday. A schedule that will not spoil the party between neighbors at the Pierre-Rajon stadium. “This programming is not necessarily a disadvantage for our organization,” said Dylan Rahis, general director of FCBJ. “All the volunteers, all the employees are mobilized for this event. The training of the other teams will take place in the morning, or training has been added another day in the week, so that everyone is mobilized from Wednesday noon. It doesn’t happen every two weeks, these kinds of events.” The Berjallien stadium will also be sold out with more than 6,000 spectators.
>>> The latest information on the Coupe de France
Thaon preferred to play in Epinal
Another N3 club, ES Thaon will also host an elite club, Strasbourg, this Wednesday at 6:30 p.m. in Epinal. If Vosges players are used to training at 7 p.m. on weekdays, pre-match preparation requires adjustments. “Playing three matches in a week, that very rarely happens for us,” explains Romain Chouleur, Thaon’s coach. “We played on Saturday, even if I’m not used to training the day before a match, we’re going to have to do a little session despite everything this Tuesday evening. Many of our players work and finish around 5:30 p.m. -6 p.m. usually to play at 6:30 p.m., we ask the players to be available from 2 p.m. for snacks, so that changes their functioning and their habits a little.”
In this club which reached the round of 16 for the third time in its history, the training sessions of the other teams scheduled for Wednesday afternoon were postponed so that all members of the club could be present at the stadium at the end of the day, in the neighboring town of Epinal. “We hope to reach 5,000 people and it would already be a great celebration,” estimates the Vosges technician. “We could also have gone to Nancy to have more space, but we chose the local side for all the people who travel, because we play at 6:30 p.m. If we also have to drive an hour, we would have maybe lost a lot of people. We prefer to have a full stadium in Epinal rather than a half-empty stadium in Nancy.”
At the same time as this Thaon-Strasbourg, Saint-Brieuc will play with a full stadium against Annecy. The Bretons’ match in the N2 championship, scheduled for last Friday, was postponed due to weather conditions and the state of the pitch at the Fred-Aubert stadium. Less worry about recovery, therefore. The fact remains that for Guillaume Allanou, who is both president and coach of Stade Briochin, “football is better on the weekend!” “It’s difficult to quantify, but we will inevitably miss spectators who will be busy with professional obligations or who will not finish early enough to come to the stadium,” he adds. “It’s a significant impact on the atmosphere, and indirectly on the club’s finances.”
“It’s elitism”
These clubs still found the staff and volunteers necessary to organize these matches during the week, thanks to the strength of the event. But this programming is a repercussion of the new formula of the Champions League introduced this season with two additional matches in January, reducing the possibilities of playing one day of Ligue 1 and Ligue 2 during the week, in order to free up an additional weekend for the French Cup.
“It’s elitism to tell the truth, it’s always a question,” notes Philippe Clément, the coach of Dives-Cabourg (N3). “It’s obvious that the Champions League has more value in the eyes of those who want to make money than the Coupe de France and a Dives-Cabourg match against Le Puy.” His counterpart from Saint-Brieuc agrees: “We may say that it is the competition of all clubs, at one point or another, we have to find elite clubs when we get closer to the final” , judge Guillaume Allanou, the Breton president-coach. “This shift during the week from the round of 16 leads me to think that we are doing everything to favor the biggest, but that will not prevent us from playing our match. I do not have the weight to change anything on the Coupe de France calendar and if we had been told when we started in the 4th round that we would have to play a match during the week, we would have signed every day.”
All these coaches ultimately believe that this round of 16 in the middle of the week against a Ligue 1 or Ligue 2 team will be their Champions League match.
Related News :