Unexpected savior, architect of the comeback, still a firefighter: “Coach Courbis” has traced a strange path at the MHSC. In his image.
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84 pages on glossy paper, dozens of unpublished photos, large-format portraits and interviews… In addition to the essential tribute to be discovered this Wednesday, December 11 on newsstands, our special issue has a few surprises in store for you: the interview with Michel Platini who tells about his friend Loulou, the vote of our Internet users to designate the best players and coaches of all time, or even the look of former Midi Libre writers and the drawings of Dadou, the essential designer from Hérault, fada of the MHSC.
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It was written. Between Rolland Courbis, a native of Marseille with legendary style, and La Paillade, the club of an even more truculent Loulou Nicollin, the marriage would sooner or later end up being sealed. The wedding will have been celebrated twice between these two parties made to get along but also to separate. The story of a somewhat pre-ordained coming and going and a novel that suits Rolland like a glove, starting out on his own, “fatigue”on Christmas Eve 2015.
His rebound in Rennes, three weeks later, then highlighted a divorce mixed with mutual attrition. At 71 years old, “Coach Courbis” only remembers the beautiful things in a club where he would have “loved playing. Working with boys like Loulou, Michel Mézy, I felt at home.”
“That’s balls!”
A rough defender from the 1970s and 80s, already a trickster and ready to invent a Greek ancestor to join Olympiakos in 1973, Courbis spent a long time around Montpellier. And its president who looked like him in a set of Pagnolesque mirrors. “We knew each other without knowing each other. But we had a mutual affection. He made me laugh,” he smiles. “And I saw that I was sympathetic to him.” The union may have taken shape on August 22, 1998, during this return from the locker room at the Vélodrome, when Courbis, coach of an OM trailing 4-0, predicted a crazy comeback to Nicollin and Mézy, managers of face. “That’s balls!”replies Loulou, in his purest style. The rest would have happened (5-4 at the final whistle). But the story had just begun a semblance of a first chapter.
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“It’s probably a coincidence.”believes the person concerned. Who prefers to refer to destiny to evoke his arrival, finally, in Montpellier, last in Ligue 2 in April 2007. On the evening of the 34th day and a setback against Châteauroux (1-3), the RMC radio consultant comes across Michel Mézy at La Mosson. A few hours later, the president's advisor managed to make Loulou, who had dismissed Jean-François Domergue ten days earlier, relent. In four matches, and despite an immediate defeat at Créteil (1-0), the magic happens. And the National, with its collateral damage, is avoided.
Rescue(s), accession and compact
“The most important thing for me is to have seen Loulou as happy as possible during this rescue. For him, dismissing club employees was a nightmare, says the technician. I think he got a stomach ulcer just thinking about it.” The swept fall remains the atypical springs of the Courbis method. Vitorino Hilton, his defender between 2013 and 2015, will summarize them as follows: “He was different from the others. Already in his way of training. He often stood aside to watch the sessions or… make phone calls. We sometimes heard him doing his broadcasts on the radio. But he was a motivator outside peer, remembered the Brazilian for The Team. He gave us talks from which we always came out stronger than our opponents.”
The accession to Ligue 1, validated on the wild night of May 29, 2009 and a Mosson armored by 30,000 spectators, also contains the touch of this inveterate player. For an apotheosis on the final day against Strasbourg (2-1). “The guardian (Johann Carasso) who blows his knee, Jourdren who returns. Then two minutes from the end, Strasbourg has an opportunity. If he equalizes…”.
Jubilation won't change anything. Courbis and Montpellier part ways after this match. And before the 2012 coronation in L1, won by his successor, René Girard. “I am leaving by building or helping to build 80% of the champion team three years later. But we will never know, if I had stayed and I had not had problems with the law, perhaps that we wouldn't have been champions.”
As if a page was missing from this novel by Paillade, the technician will eventually return to it, in December 2013. “As soon as we saw each other again with Loulou, we started to smile”breathes Courbis. Under his orders, M'Baye Niang crashes his car, but the coach avoids leaving the road again and maintains the MHSC, honoring this pact that he claims to have made with the founder of the club: that he never finds the L2 during their lifetime. The second departure in 2015 and the annoyances had tarnished the idyll, not the memories which, with Courbis, are never normal. “I tend to be a little original”he summarizes. Like Montpellier, in short.
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