Metz Que Un Club: The night Metz humbled Barcelona

Earlier this week Paris Saint-Germain impressively beat Barcelona at the Parc des Princes, repeating their feat of 1995. However, only one French club has succeeded in beating the Catalan giants in their own back yard. This Friday, 3 October, sees the thirtieth anniversary of one of French football’s greatest European club results, and one of Barcelona’s biggest humiliations.

Following their shock Coupe de France win over French giants AS Monaco in the spring of 1984, FC Metz were looking forward to embarking on their European campaign. As Metz’s name was drawn out of the hat for the first round of the European Cup Winners’ Cup, opinions were divided between those who wanted a small-fry team that would allow them to progress further into the competition, and those who wanted a glamour tie with less chance of success but more chance of exposure and revenue. The next name called fell very much into the latter camp…

Metz were to play Spanish and European giants Barcelona. Nine-time Spanish champions, twenty-time Spanish Cup winners, five-time European trophy winners, appearing in Europe for the 29th straight year. In comparison, Metz’s palmarès extended to a second division championship half a century earlier, the 1984 Coupe and two unimpressive Fairs Cup campaigns in the late 1960s.

Unsurprisingly, the bookmakers had the Blaugranas down very much as favourites, but 22,000 locals nevertheless packed into the Stade Saint-Symphorien on the evening of 19 September 1984, more in hope than expectation, of a strong Messin performance. They were to be disappointed.

Metz’s young team, perhaps overwhelmed by the occasion, perhaps intimidated by the opposition, froze and put on a shocking display. Goalkeeper Michel Ettorre commented that “we’d all already played the match a thousand times over in our heads. We’d lost it.” Les Grenats’ match began in farcical circumstances as, in the twelfth minute, a total communication breakdown between Ettorre and Luc Sonor saw the defender, who had turned 22 only the previous weekend, put the ball into his own net from twenty yards out. Metz did manage to react and half-time came with the score at 1-1, Toni Kurbos equalising after a brilliant through-ball from Senegalese forward Jules Bocandé.

But two minutes into the second half, the Lorrains’ luck deserted them as, from a Bernd Schuster free kick, the ball hit a divot, leaving Ettorre flat-footed and embarrassed. That opened the floodgates and two more goals in the next 17 minutes, the first after an ill-judged crossfield ball was cut out, the second after Schuster stole the ball metres outside the Metz area, gave Barca a comfortable 4-1 lead. A late Jean-Philippe Rohr penalty gave the scoreline, 4-2, a semblance of respectability that Metz barely deserved.

Rohr observed that “I had rarely felt an opponent as superior as was the case in that first leg. God knows that we had a good team, but there were two classes between us, especially in terms of strength and technique.” Barcelona’s legendary German midfield maestro Schuster and Scottish striker Steve Archibald rubbed salt into the hosts’ wounds, Schuster saying that he would buy Ettorre a ham to thank him for his mistakes, and Archibald branding the Metz players clowns. The Barcelona vice-president also got involved, saying that he would invite the Metz team to the Camp Nou as guests – for the next round.

No team in the history of European club competition had ever come back from a 2-4 home defeat to win. And Metz’s patchy away form hardly augured well, les Grenats having recently conceded four at Strasbourg and lost 0-7 in Monaco. A victory for Terry Venables’ men was surely a formality. Indeed, French television was so sure of the result that they did not bother travelling to broadcast the match. Only one Républicain Lorrain writer and one France Inter reporter made the trip.

However, Metz’s pride had been injured and they were not prepared to lie down and play the fall guys. This was a close-knit group, built on team spirit and collectiveness. Of the sixteen-man squad, eleven had come through the youth ranks together. This was a club that twelve months earlier had been threatened with administration, had carried on their shoulders the hopes of a region devastated by the demise of the local steel industry, and had recovered from being second-bottom at the season mid-point to go on to secure safety and battle to an against-the-odds cup win.

Metz President Carlo Molinari, disagreeing with Rohr, recalled that “Marcel [Husson, Metz coach] and me, we believed that we could get out of this with our heads held high and get a win at the Camp Nou. We didn’t think we could qualify, but that we could leave the competition without being embarrassed. In the first leg we gave them three of their four goals, but the technical differences were not so marked. We had two rockets in attack, Kurbos and Hinschberger, whilst the Spanish central defence was very slow. There was something to play for in Barcelona.” The team also began to improve on the pitch, going three matches unbeaten, including two away wins. Barcelona, however, continued to show arrogance; after all, that “slow” Spanish defence was made up of four internationals: Sanchez, Migueli, Alesanco and Julio Alberto. Metz sent captain Jean-Paul Bernad, suspended for the intervening league matches, to Barcelona to scout the team. This was met with surprise and hilarity by the Catalans, but Husson later acknowledged that Bernad prepared a good summary which was a help.

The Messins’ reaction when they arrived in Barcelona highlighted the gulf between the two football clubs. Rohr remembers that “normally the [pre-match training] sessions last 45 minutes and we take it easy. But there [in the Camp Nou] we were little kids. We played 7 vs 7 for two and a half hours. Just for fun, because we were enjoying it so much there.” In fact, they treated the build-up more as tourists. Pierre Theobald, author of FC Barcelone – FC Metz: le match de leur vie (Serpenoise), remembers the players telling him about bringing their wives along for the journey, about bumping into Yannick Noah, in town for an ATP tournament, and drinking till 2am, about how the wives of Husson and Kurbos, realising after the third or fourth knock on the door that they had somehow ended up in a hotel of ill repute, broke into the players’ hotel to find their husbands – and then bumped into Molinari when trying to keep a low profile!

The night of the match came, with bookmakers giving up to 100 to 1 on a Metz win. The locals clearly weren’t expecting much of a match either: only around 24,000 (including barely 100 Metz fans) attended – more than for the first leg, but then the Camp Nou could hold up to four times that number. And the first half hour or so suggested that Schuster, Archibald, the bookies and the fans had been correct, as Barcelona dominated, and Michel Ettorre was forced to pull out a string of saves to bail out the team: “as bad as I was in the first leg, in this match I perhaps had more touches than in any other 90 minutes of my career”. Those missed chances began to give the Messins more belief – even after Carrasco had given the Catalans the lead after 33 minutes, meaning that Metz now needed to score four to qualify.

That lead lasted five minutes, before a period of ninety seconds which turned the tie. First, Bernad released Toni Kurbos, Metz’s moustachioed Slovenian-German, down the right, behind Venables’ high defensive line that Metz had identified as a weakness. Outpacing the left back, he saw reserve goalkeeper Amador off his line and hit an unstoppable shot high into the net at the near post from a tight angle. Then, moments after Barca had restarted the game, Sonor stole the ball from Archibald; it was worked to Bernad who released Kurbos again, and his cross was clumsily bundled into his own net by Blaugrana captain Sanchez, karmically cancelling out Sonor’s first leg own goal. Suddenly, the Spanish giants were rattled. Metz midfielder Vincent Bracigliano remembers “funnily enough, when the tide began to turn, Schuster smiled a lot less and instead spent his time insulting us.”

 

A 1-2 scoreline at half-time and the unthinkable suddenly seemed possible. Barely probable, but at least the Lorrains had saved face and could relax, and perhaps that made the difference. Ten minutes into the second half and following two more Ettorre saves, a sweet passing move ended with Bernad lofting a magnificent pass over the Barca defence. Kurbos was quicker than Amador, chipped the ball past the on-rushing keeper and slid it into the empty net. 1-3. 5-5 on aggregate. One goal away from immortality.

Archibald was put clear and had the chance to put the minnows back in their place, but Ettorre again came up with a great save. And then, with five minutes remaining, Bocandé (who sadly passed away in 2012 after complications from an operation) was played in on the left. His first cross was blocked but the ball came back to him, he turned his defender and squared to Kurbos who, in a move reminiscent of an equally dramatic goal by Michel Platini only months before against Portugal, took one touch to control, before powering the ball high into the net. Kurbos had completed a hat-trick that immediately sealed his legendary status in French football.

Metz held on for the last few minutes, to complete one of the biggest shocks in European football, beating Barcelona 4-1 in the Camp Nou. The players, dead on their feet (Kurbos could barely stand through a mixture of shock and exhaustion) fell into each other’s arms – all except Ettorre, who made a beeline for Schuster, screaming “where is my ham now?!”. The band of brothers had achieved the impossible.

When the result came through the wires to France, many thought that the scores had accidentally been reversed. Legend has it that Jean Sadoul, president of the LFP at the time, heard the result on his car radio and had to pull over, such was his shock.

The players, as if to add to their newly attained superstar status, spent the night hanging out in the Camp Nou bar with tennis star Mats Wilander. The players were again reminded of this different world that they had been allowed, for a few precious hours, to inhabit, when they went to the stadium car park to load their baggage into the coach. Bracigliano recalls “we saw all the Barca players leaving in their Porsches, Ferraris etc. At the time, we all drove 2CVs or Renault 8s. At that moment we felt as if there was a world between them and us.”

Of course, the match did not have a major lasting effect on either club in the long term. Barcelona went on to win that season’s Liga, their first championship for 11 years. Metz were anti-climactically knocked out of the Cup Winners’ Cup in the next round by Dynamo Dresden, before going on to finish an impressive fifth in Le Championnat to qualify for the following year’s UEFA Cup. The team itself quickly broke up, Kurbos moving to Saint-Etienne, Rohr and Bernad to Nice and Sonor to Monaco. But Metz was now a recognised name in European football and, for a short moment, their players were the toast of the footballing world. The Grenat fans have endured their fair share of ups and downs in the intervening years and even an opportunity to repeat such a feat seems a long way off. But those who remember that night 30 years ago will always have Barcelona.

Barcelone – Metz : 1-4
1st round, European Cup Winners’ Cup second leg
Wednesday 3 October 1984
Camp Nou
Metz scorers: Kurbos (38°), Sanchez (39°, og), Kurbos (55°), Kurbos (85°); Barcelona scorer: Carrasco (33°).
Metz XI: Ettorre, Lowitz, Zappia, Barraja (Pauk, 60°), Sonor (Colombo, 52°), Rohr, Bracigliano, Bernad, Hinschberger, Kurbos, Bocandé. Coach: Marcel Husson.

Watch the full match here: