By David Owen
May 8 – All cup competitions produce shock results, but the century-old Coupe de France must be in a league of its own.
Tonight at five past nine in the national stadium, the Stade de France, the 100th French Cup final will pit mighty Paris Saint-Germain, one of the dozen or so members of the wealthy European elite and by far the dominant force in the modern French club game, against a team from a small town in the Vendée region of western France whose entire population would fill less than a fifth of the seats.
Les Herbiers Vendée Football currently lie 13th in the Championnat National, the French third tier, with an uninspiring record of nine wins, 12 draws and ten defeats. In their red and black colours, they have amassed just 36 goals in these 31 games. Yet they have battled their way through to tonight’s final, albeit without yet encountering a top flight side.
You might imagine this was an unrepeatable mismatch – and indeed the bookies have PSG, bidding for a fourth consecutive French Cup win, as favourites at unbackable odds of 1-100 (lay £100 to win £101).
But in fact it is only six years since another third division team, Quevilly, reached the final, and lost only 1-0 to Lyon. And you only have to go back to 2000 to find a club from even lower down the national hierarchy – Calais – making it to the showpiece occasion. Once again, they only just came up short, losing 2-1 to first division Nantes.
Between 2001 and 2005, no fewer than three second division clubs – Amiens, Châteauroux and Sedan – ended up as beaten finalists, and the margin was never more than a single goal.
The preponderance of minnows is probably in part attributable to a rule which confers home advantage on clubs competing two levels or more below their opponents, irrespective of who came first out of the hat. With the final on neutral ground, this perhaps also helps to explain why so few of the small fry have actually lifted the trophy – although second division Guingamp did beat first division Rennes in 2009.
It seems highly implausible that Les Herbiers, though more than 50 years older than their illustrious opponents, will tonight become the first third-tier side to lift the trophy. Then again, La Vendée has a history of refusing to submit easily to Parisian authority. In the late 18th century it was the centre of the largest counter-revolutionary uprising of the French Revolution.
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