Stephane Guivarc'h: World Cup Winner

[Uilleam 5,429]

From today's Times (World Cup Supplement)

 

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/sport/stephane-guivarch-i-would-happily-trade-20-of-the-goals-i-scored-for-one-in-the-world-cup-final-lf7v5kmql

 

WORLD CUP 2018 | STÉPHANE GUIVARC’H

Stéphane Guivarc’h: The French World Cup winner who now sells swimming pools

 

James Gheerbrant meets Stéphane Guivarc’h, the striker who failed to score but still played a key role in the hosts’ 1998 victory

 

The Times, July 9 2018, 5:00pm

 

The first thing you notice about Stéphane Guivarc’h, as he raises an incongruously dainty espresso cup to his lips in a small café in western Brittany, is his hands. Big, tough, coarse hands, with calluses on the palms and roughened nails. Hands that have known the toll and texture of hard work. Hands that have knocked on doors from Carhaix to Brest. And then he starts to reminisce about a summer two decades ago, the memories flood him to the fingertips, and you remember that those hands, one night in another century, once held the most precious trophy in sport.

“On the day of the [World Cup] final, we left Clairefontaine, we’d been holed up in our hotel there, and to see so many people sent a shiver up your spine,” he says. “It showed that we had left a mark on people’s spirits. It was nice to see people together for once, without insulting each other. And to have a France-Brazil final, it couldn’t have been more perfect. We accomplished something exceptional, but that’s the power of sport. For some people, life is hard, and we gave them something beautiful.”

Now, 20 years to the week after that sublime night at the Stade de France, on the eastern edge of Europe a new generation of French heroes is just two wins from realising a second rhapsody in blue. France, who play Belgium in the first semi-final tonight, are managed by Guivarc’h’s captain in the 1998 team, Didier Deschamps.

“Didier is down this way from time to time. His wife is from Concarneau so they have a house just up the coast,” says Guivarc’h, who sees parallels of his own role in Deschamps’ use of Olivier Giroud.

 

Deschamps’ tactical acumen is often maligned but his old team-mate says that his ability to galvanise a collective is not to be underestimated. “In 1998, Didier was Aimé Jacquet’s right-hand man,” Guivarc’h remembers. “He had a way of getting something out of us. It was certain that he’d become a manager.”

The 1998 World Cup win was a joy that filled France right to the very edges, and it is on one of those jagged, coastal edges that its forgotten hero has chosen to make his life. In a town called Trégunc, one of those places where everyone knows everyone and the smell of the sea wafts into the church square on a breezy day, Guivarc’h, the striker in Jacquet’s team, lives a life of extraordinary ordinariness as a swimming-pool salesman. The man who led the line does not want to be at the forefront any more.

We are sitting in Le Maryland, Guivarc’h’s regular coffee haunt. “I was born in this area,” he says. “All my close family are here: there’s my father, my brother, my sister. I left home at 14 and I returned here at 32 at the end of my career.”

 

In between, Guivarc’h carved himself an unlikely place in history. In the mid-1990s, he had successive 20-goal seasons for the Breton club Guingamp in the third and second tiers. That earned him a move to top-flight Auxerre, where he flopped, scoring just three goals in his first season. He was sent to Rennes, where he caught fire and scored 22 goals in the league. The next season he returned to Auxerre and at the age of 27 made his France debut in October 1997.

At the World Cup, Guivarc’h played in every knockout game, starting the last three. A physical centre forward, like Giroud, he fulfilled the important task of holding the ball up and harrying defenders, but he did not score and by the following year, he was out of the France team for good. He won only 14 caps — none of his starting team-mates in the World Cup final ended with fewer than 50. Imagine England winning the World Cup with James Beattie or Kevin Phillips up front, and you are somewhere close.

 

The end of Guivarc’h’s international career was hastened by an ill-fated season in Britain, with a disastrous four months at Newcastle United followed by an injury-ravaged spell at Rangers. After France had won Euro 2000 without him, Guivarc’h ended his third spell at Auxerre and returned home to Brittany to spend the final year of his playing career at Guingamp. His mother was ill and he wanted to be close enough to visit her twice a week. It was in the days after her death, in the rootless aftermath of his own retirement, that the curious second act of his professional destiny was crystallised.

 

“It happened quite naturally,” Guivarc’h says. “My mother died and my father found himself all alone. He’s of a generation that didn’t do certain things for themselves: the cooking, the paperwork. So I moved in with him, and then the boss of the swimming-pool company, who happens to be a childhood friend, was installing a boiler at his house. He mentioned that he was looking for a partner in the swimming-pool business. I said to him as a joke, ‘I’ll do it.’ He thought about it that evening, and the next day he said to me, ‘Why not?’ And I’ve been doing it for 12 years now.”

It is honest work. Guivarc’h needs to sell two pools a month to hit his targets. Every year, he clocks up 60,000km in the car. He does not bring up his past life, but often someone will answer their front door in Finistère and recognise the craggy stranger who has come to extol the cost benefits of a polyester shell.

“The first time I meet a customer, if they’re a football fan, it’s not uncommon to spend half an hour talking about swimming pools and an hour talking football,” Guivarc’h says. “It’s nice, it allows you to connect with somebody’s passion rather than just talking pools, pools, pools. They like to share a moment. But it’s also a professional relationship. You don’t win every deal, there’s a competitive aspect there too.”

 

Guivarc’h is an oddity in a world where it often seems that footballers don’t exit the stage any more, they just change costume. Of his team-mates in the 1998 squad, Deschamps, Zinédine Zidane, Laurent Blanc and Patrick Vieira are, or were, big-name coaches. Thierry Henry, Marcel Desailly, Bixente Lizarazu, Christian Karembeu and Emmanuel Petit are instantly recognisable TV pundits and Henry will be helping Roberto Martínez in the Belgium dugout tonight. Even Lilian Thuram, a political activist, and Frank Leboeuf, an actor, are still in the public eye.

 

“There are some people who feel that if the cameras aren’t on them they no longer exist,” Guivarc’h says. “But I’ve never been like that. If TV crews or reporters come looking for me, I’m happy to oblige. I don’t hide myself away, but equally I don’t come looking for you.”

 

Guivarc’h could have trodden the same path as Zidane. In his final spell at Auxerre, he started taking his coaching badges, but Guy Roux, the coach, found out and told him there would be plenty of time for that when he retired. Then his mother died and life took a different turn. But Guivarc’h does not lose sleep over it. “Zidane got to live his passion,” he says. “But he can’t walk down the street like I can. I know peace and quiet, something he will never have. I prefer my life: being able to do what I like without being hounded by cameras. It’s a career choice, a life choice. Everyone knows Zinédine Zidane, as the greatest player in the world, and maybe the greatest manager too. Maybe people don’t know who Stéphane Guivarc’h is, but it doesn’t bother me — I know I existed.”

 

The coffee machine hisses, cups chink against saucers, two old regulars natter on a corner table. Guivarc’h prefers this soundtrack to one of flashbulbs and flatterers. “It’s a super corner of the world,” he says. “Life here is tranquil, the people are warm, and the fact that my whole family are here meant this was where I laid my hat. I feel so comfortable here that it would be a real wrench to ever leave. People aren’t on top of each other. And you’ve got the sea.”

The sea is where Guivarc’h likes to spend his Sundays, the ozone filling his nostrils and soothing his soul. “We fish very often, from the beginning of April to the end of September,” he says. “It’s so nice to be out on the water. We fish for mackerel, pollock, bass – the good fish! And then you also have spider crabs. You put the pots in the water, and afterwards you eat the catch. It’s lovely.”

 

An opportunistic security guard stole the shirt that Guivarc'h wore in the 1998 World Cup finalPOPPERFOTO/GETTY IMAGES

Occasionally the memories of that golden summer come swimming back to the surface. The open-top bus parade, when a million people thronged the Champs Élysées. The final itself, bittersweet for Guivarc’h, who missed two good chances 
and had his match shirt stolen by a security guard within hours of the final whistle. Raised on the rhythms of the tide, he can smile at the way his luck was in before it was out.

“I was playing for Guingamp two years before and if somebody had told me I was going to win the World Cup, I’d have said, ‘What sort of a moron do you take me for?’ ” he laughs. “But I worked hard to get here, and I was in the right place at the right time.

“All that I was missing was a goal. If only I hadn’t had such a square foot the day of the final! I would happily trade ten of the 41 goals that I scored in the league and cup that season, 20 even, for one in the final. But that’s football. Regrets . . . you can have them and you always will, for missed opportunities. People who don’t regret anything have never done anything.”

His hair may have greyed, his fame may have faded, but this small-town guy will always be a champion. His history is written; now a new generation have a chance to make their own.

“We accomplished the most beautiful thing imaginable,” he says. “But why shouldn’t they do the same? That would be something, to have a second star on the France shirt.”

[TheUKCrazyhorse 96]

"People who don’t regret anything have never done anything."

 

What a great quote.