On Sunday August 7, FC Nantes will start the championship with a short trip to Angers. The opportunity to recall the history of matches between these two neighbors and to remember some great rivalries between the two clubs.
Nantes – Angers is a derby, rarely spectacular, except to go back several decades, it is not a great classic and if the two clubs have often met, it was not always at the highest level , their respective trajectories being historically not very similar.
Their first clashes took place in the Western Championship in the 1940s, when the Canaries got used to wearing the colors that earned them their nickname. They owe them to a manager who owned a stable of racehorses whose results contributed to his portfolio and he thought that if the yellow and green succeeded in his foals there was no reason for it to be any different for footballers.
The first match between Angers and Nantes, in 1943, however turned to the confusion of Nantes since they lost 3-0, it was besides their heaviest setback of the season. Their affairs were settled thereafter, unlike those of our horse owner whose prosperity had increased notably thanks to a lucrative but unsavory trade with the Nazi occupier, so much so that he judged it more prudent, after the Liberation, to go green for a while on the Swiss side.
As proof that FC Nantes and SCO d’Angers do not frequently live together on the same floor, we note the fact that this year they are in their 8th consecutive season together in Ligue 1. yet a record. On the other hand, after their adhesion to professionalism, they walked together for a long time in the 2nd Division. Angers was the first to extricate itself from it in 1956. From there, the Raymond-Kopa stadium, which was then called the Bessonneau stadium, named after an Angers industrialist, hosted posters encouraging football fans from the region to come to fill its uncomfortable spans in number. Among them was a young coach officiating in an anonymous team from the Sarthe, an autodidact who constantly took notes in school notebooks, dissected the patterns of play and then asked his young players to put them into practice on field.
When José Arribas went to see the SCO play
His name was José Arribas and he explained to them so well what to do that soon US Noyen, the club he was coaching, rose through the ranks and became a regional benchmark for the quality of the game. He was not satisfied with observing Angers and his adversaries, the Stade de Reims and the Racing Club de Paris in particular, he read the newspapers, studied the style of the different teams, remembered the best and added his grain of salt, which had essentially collectivism.
Arribas came all the more willingly to Angers as the city was dear to him because he had married a local girl, Suzanne, a basketball player with whom they ran a café on the banks of the Sarthe.
In 1960, the SCO was looking for a coach, its leaders certainly did not think of Arribas, in which they were wrong, they set their sights on Karel Michlowski who officiated in Nantes. He had arrived there a year earlier, he had spoken of being part of a long-term project but when the SCO made him proposals he forgot his good intentions and went to meet Jean Clerfeuille, the president of the FCN: ” You told me that you want to go up to D1 one day.
_ It is our project, indeed.
_ Well, if you want my opinion, given the players we have and the means we have, it’s not tomorrow the day before.
_ But for the moment, we cannot recruit, we have no money. You have to be patient.
_ I’m not. I don’t want to wait 10 years. So, I’m sorry but I’m leaving you. The D1 for me is right away.
_ What ?
_ I’m going to Angers.
It was after this ”desertion” that Jean Clerfeuille, tired of the mercenary coaches, more concerned about the content of their portfolio than the style of their team, decided to give an unknown technician a chance, a café owner from Noyen-sur-Sarthe, who already knew Nantes for having landed there a quarter of a century earlier, when he was on board a tub crowded with Spanish refugees fleeing Franco’s dictatorship.
The FCN and the SCO finally together in Division 1 in 1963
José Arribas settled in Nantes clearly showing his pleasure, unlike his predecessor, he was happy to train a 2nd Division team. Three years later, the two clubs finally found themselves among the elite. But without Karel Michlowski who had been fired from the SCO in the meantime and had been replaced by Antoine Pasquini.
The story between the two clubs was therefore really beginning, it was not fierce and no one was offended when Arribas brought Guelzo Zaetta from Angers to make him his deputy and then the head of youth training. If an official of the SCO, a few years later, ventured to establish the list of players who, detected by Zaetta, had a career in Nantes, it is possible that he caught pimples… Few players attended the two clubs, Claude Arribas, one of José’s sons, is however one of those and although living in Angers he continues to attend La Beaujoire assiduously. Loïc Amisse, a pure Nantes native, went on his side to finish his career as a player on the banks of the Maine while, much later, in 2005, Guillaume Norbert, son of one of the presidents of the SCO, came to Nantes where he was trained by Serge Le Dizet who, for his part, then made a long stay in Angers, the time to see Nicolas Gillet and Claudiu Keserü again, whom he had met at La Jonelière and to get to know David De Freitas, another former Nantes resident .
Guillou against Henri Michel, matches in the match
Dizet was not yet born (it is from 1964) when the FCN and the SCO faced each other for the first time in Division 1, on Saturday October 19, 1963. On the lawn of Marcel-Saupin, we still said Malakoff, the Canaries won 1-0, goal by Jacky Simon. The return match was much more prolific since 6 goals were scored, 3 on each side. Simon hit the mark twice this time, Gondet scored another goal fifteen minutes from the end and the Nantes team embraced each other with all the more joy as their center forward had just allowed them to equalize and that They came from afar because the SCO had led 3-0.
It was only a few years later and after a quarter-final of the Coupe de France which had enabled Marcel-Saupin to establish the attendance record in its entire history that the confrontations between the two clubs constituted high-profile posters. picture. Nantes had been champion of France in 1973 and Angers, under the leadership of Jean-Marc Guillou and Albert Poli, two midfielders of great talent, practiced attacking and licked football such as we had never seen and that ‘we don’t see them again in Anjou. Guillou always outdid himself against Nantes, perhaps because as a young man he had been rejected during a scouting session for young regional players at the Parc de Procé (originally from Bouaye, he played for Saint-Nazaire) and his face-to-face with Henri Michel were akin to matches within a match, real pieces of anthology where both competed in technical skill and inspiration, without forgetting the principles of collective play because they knew how to put their extraordinary virtuosity at the service of others .
Their duel was spiced up by the controversies surrounding the coach of the France team, a certain Georges Boulogne, a rigorous and conformist spirit whom the champions of attacking football criticized sharply while they praised Guillou. However, Boulogne superbly and stupidly disdained the Angevin playmaker while that of Nantes was considered one of his darlings. It is however not sure at all, on the contrary, that Henri Michel, even if he did not say it, endorsed the Boulognesque options.
In any case, when they clashed, everyone feasted. Them, their partners and, of course, the public. The Nantes – Angers of those years smelled of both sulphur, because there were no gifts and genius as the actors strove to develop offensives and seductive movements.
Again in Ligue 1 but far from the leading roles
And then Guillou went to Nice, Poli took over the management of Paris Saint-Germain, striker Marc Berdoll accepted offers from Saarbrücken and the SCO fell into line. Worse, he went back down to the 2nd Division in 1975, he went back up, went down again but he was no longer able to fight with FC Nantes which in 1980 won at the Bessonneau stadium, sorry Jean-Bouin, it’s crazy how this place changes name, three days from the end, a success bringing him closer to a fifth title of champion of France. Angers then had a winger, Patrice Lecornu, who seemed able to bring happiness to FC Nantes where he was transferred in 1981. Except that he frequented the infirmary of La Jonelière more often than the lawn of Marcel-Saupin.
In any case, the route of the two big Loire clubs was now separated, the Angevins even made a detour via the National. They were moping there when, in 2005, the FCN refueled Jean-Bouin during a Coupe de France match against… Saumur. And then came 2007, with descent from Nantes on one side, the first since its accession in 1963, promotion from Angers on the other: the FCN and the SCO again lived on the same floor, in the 2nd Division. Like in the days of lean cows.
It was not until 2015 that we saw them again, finally, together among the elite. However, they no longer hold the leading roles there, they are even far from it. So when they happen to provide a good derby, as was the case on September 19, 2021 when Nantes won Angers 4-1, it seems difficult to be choosy. The Angevins, they probably prefer to retain the date of December 21, 2019 when they came to win at La Beaujoire, 2-1. To hear them, and we could have done it if the match hadn’t been so sad, it was almost historic. It is true that the last success of the SCO in D1 in Nantes dates back to the 1967-68 season. That day, one of their youngsters made his debut under their colours. Warned at the last moment because one of his partners had injured himself during the warm-up, he had rushed into the locker room to put on his crampons. And there, amazement, he realized that he had forgotten them. He hadn’t panicked, it wasn’t his style, he had borrowed a pair of shoes and he had played his match, calmly, serenely, displaying a technique and a mastery that had impressed everyone. His name was Jean-Marc Guillou.
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