Clermont Foot will play the 22/23 season in Ligue 1. As the club struggled to avoid play-offs or relegation, salvation came with the defeat of Saint-Etienne. Pascal Gastien, the trainer evokes a relief.
Despite a match lost to Strasbourg 1-0, the weekend ended very well for Clermont Foot, which remains in league 1 for the next season. This maintenance acquired, even before the last match of the season, is due to the defeat of Saint-Etienne who lost to Reims. So here is the Clermont team reassured about its fate.
“We will be able to savor, all together”
“It’s a relief,” explains coach Pascal Gastien in the post-match interview published by the club on its website. “We will be able to savor, all together. We can not say that it is an achievement, but not far anyway. Rightly, everyone saw us going down at the start of the season. Small budget, we didn’t know about Ligue 1… there were a lot of parameters that suggested that we were going to have a very complicated season and I confirm that it was complicated. But we took points when necessary, we were able to pull ourselves together. Really, the season has had its ups and downs, periods of 6 or 7 games without winning, we came back afterwards, we again didn’t win for 6 games and we came back again on the last 5. Stéphane Moulin had warned me. He had experienced the rise with Angers (…) we could have panicked at some point and we remained stable at all levels of the club, including at management level. We have always kept our desire to play well to win matches.
Do you want to change things during difficult times?
“I am not suicidal at all. We’ve been playing like that for five years, we’ve recruited players to play like that. I think it would have been suicidal to change the way we play. The club’s project is much stronger than a season in my opinion. It fits over time into a certain philosophy. We want the duration in the game and it’s not me who would let go. It hasn’t been all rosy, there have been difficult times, but we have always come together, we have always kept our line of conduct and we have been rewarded. The grumpy will say that we run away with 36 points… but who cares. We’re all going to rest and after the holidays, here we go again! ”
