Stade Rongiéras de Périgueux, the sports assistant briefs technical agents under the gaze of the leaders of the Bergerac Périgord Football club (BPFC), playing in National 2. Paul Maso asks them to install “goals without ears”, with ” tight nets” because “it’s prettier” and “the soccer players prefer”.
Friday, January 7, barely the decision was made to play in Périgueux the meeting between the BPFC and the Association Sportive de Saint-Étienne (ASSE…
Stade Rongiéras de Périgueux, the sports assistant briefs technical agents under the gaze of the leaders of the Bergerac Périgord Football club (BPFC), playing in National 2. Paul Maso asks them to install “goals without ears”, with ” tight nets” because “it’s prettier” and “the soccer players prefer”.
Friday, January 7, barely the decision was made to play in Périgueux the meeting between the BPFC and the Association Sportive de Saint-Étienne (ASSE), Ligue 1 club, in the round of 16 of the Coupe de France, that all s were investing. However, two days earlier, the Bergerac club dreamed of a home game.
Gaston-Simounet?
“As soon as we had this fabulous draw against the Greens, our priority was to play in Bergerac, at the Gaston-Simounet stadium which allowed us to achieve some exploits”, says the president of the BPFC, Christophe Fauvel, recalling the 32nd then 16th finals victorious respectively against Metz and Créteil. Not to mention “the important emotions” experienced by the public.
The club was even “prepared to sacrifice spectators”, as they knew that it would “not be possible to have standing room”. In doing so, the stadium gauge went from 4,500 to 2,300 spectators. Except that on Wednesday evening, “a phone call from the federation” upset his plans: “Have you properly integrated the health protocol which requires 1 meter distance between each seat? Christophe Fauvel then did the accounts: “Knowing that 500 official invitations are imposed on us, we only had 700 places left to sell. A heresy for this event. »
Other stadiums
With the Bergerac solution put away, the president picked up his phone and called “everywhere in New Aquitaine”. In the absence of a viable solution, the risk was that Saint-Étienne would host the meeting. Brive, Périgueux, Limoges, Libourne, Bordeaux: different hypotheses have been studied.
In Brive, Corrèze, they discovered “great infrastructure”. Except that a Top 14 rugby match must be played the day before: “There was a big risk that the pitch would not be ready for our meeting scheduled for Sunday [NDLR : 30 janvier], at 6:30 p.m..” Limoges, in Haute-Vienne, was “fabulous” but, far from Bergerac, he feared “distorting the event”. At the Chaban-Delmas stadium in Bordeaux, he felt “only constraints” from his interlocutors: “It sounded hollow. »
” As a courtesy “
There remained the favorite plan B: Périgueux. Christophe Fauvel “felt a real will of the municipality which warms the heart […]. If it was not possible in Bergerac, we wanted it to be in Périgord. The further away we go, the more our chances diminish. Paul Fauvel, his son, who heads the BPFC, estimates the capacity of the enclosure at “3,300 to 4,000 spectators”.
His loan is made “free of charge”, specifies Paul Maso, also a former coach and adviser to the president of the BPFC, who assures that the City “will provide the means to support this event”.
For his part, Christophe Fauvel beats the reminder of the departmental and Bergerac elected officials in order to “give a hand with the logistics and the transport of the spectators. I hope they will pay their dues. »
See also page 25.