One sunny September afternoon last year, whilst on holiday in Brittany, my wife Paulene and I went to the coastal town of Lorient, to the Stade du Moustoir, to witness the Ligue 1 fixture between FC Lorient  and Breton rivals FC Nantes. It was a fabulous afternoon and before an almost capacity crowd we saw Lorient triumph by three goals to two. Everyone was marvellous, I met the Lorient mascot Merlux the hake, and in a fit of consumer madness powered by a premium bond win that week , I bought a T-shirt, a mug, a fridge magnet, a cuddly hake, and a pennant to adorn my upstairs toilet. I have yearned to return ever since and so has Paulene. Today is the day we fulfil our modest dream.

It’s only a thirty-five-minute drive up the E60 and along the N165 through neighbouring Lanester to Lorient from where we are staying, and being old hands we know where we can handily park our planet saving Citroen e-C4, and so set the controls for the heart of the town.  We find a parking spot beneath an avenue of shady limes in the Boulevard Marechal Joffe and walk to the ground, which is superbly central next to the town hall, handy for buses and trains like all football grounds should be.  In Lorient, the town centre car parks are closed on a Sunday match day which sounds daft, but when you think about it is a pretty good idea to encourage people to travel ‘responsibly’, although street parking is free and plentiful.  Yesterday, I received an e-mail from FC Lorient giving me the pre-match lowdown and inviting me along to greet the team as they arrive at the ground, so that’s what we do, joining mostly children and their parents to cheer the players off the bus and enjoy the sound of Fatboy Slim’s “Right Here, Right Now” played on Breton bagpipes.  Merlux the hake mascot (so-called because the binomial name for Hake is Merluccius merlucciusis and the French for Hake is Merlu) is of course present, and he now has an accomplice called Mini Merlux.  The spawning grounds of the Hake are in the Bay of Biscay, the expanse of water which the south coast of Brittany faces.  I had always thought that seafood-based club mascots were restricted to Sammy the Shrimp at Southend United, but I am very pleased to be able to report that this is not true and I’m now keeping a look out for any clubs with fish, crabs, lobsters or assorted shellfish on their crests.

Having greeted the team, who sport natty Breton-style stripey T-shirts making them look as if they should be disembarking from a ship not a bus, there is still over an hour to go until kick-off at five past five.  Keen to know more of Lorient than just the Stade du Moustoir and the route back to our car, we set off to explore a little, heading over the road towards what my instinct and a possible onshore breeze tells me could be the harbour.  My instinct is correct, and Lorient proves to be a town like Ipswich where if you have a yacht you can sail to matches, with a marina within easy walking distance of the stadium.  Arriving for a match under sail has to be even greener than catching the bus, I cannot think why everyone is not doing it.

Wishing to visit the club shop again, have a wander inside the ground and sample the refreshments on offer, we return to the stadium having glimpsed the land on the other side of the water from Lorient. Our seats (20 euros each) are in the fabulous Tribune d’Honneur, now known as the Tribune Credit Mutuel de Bretagne, the smallest and oldest of the four stands, having been built when the ground was first opened in 1959.  The Tribune d’Honneur has a marvellous cantilever roof of beautiful, vaulted and shuttered concrete with shiny steel cables to help hold it up. The back of the stand has a series of narrow, angled concrete columns with angular shuttered concrete arches at the top, and metal framed doors and windows at ground level; behind the stand is an avenue of plane trees which cast a lovely, dappled shade over it.  The stand symbolises the renewal and rebuilding of the early postwar period and is a thing of beauty, way ahead of anything built in Britain at the time. Sadly, with grand proposals to upgrade the stadium to make it better suited to cultural events as well as football, the Tribune d’Honneur is likely to be demolished before we all get much older.

Tripping out on 1950’s concrete, I escort Paulene to the Tavarn Morgana bar beneath the Tribune B & B Hotels where I buy her a glass of the local Breizh Cola (4 euros), which she far prefers to the American rubbish, and a 40ml re-usable plastic glass of Lancelot IPA (6 euros), and pretty good it is too, by several country miles the best beer I’ve ever been served beneath a stand at a professional football club ground.  Paulene now holds my beer whilst I pop into the club shop, accessible from inside the ground but not from without at this stage, to purchase a glorious orange T-shirt (25 euros), the last large size one on the rail, which proudly displays a silhouette of the Lorient skyline with its dockside cranes and submarine dock, beneath the name Lorient.  The great thing about Stade du Moustoir is that it is possible to walk right around it beneath and behind each stand in turn, and that is what we do, taking in the sites and sounds and smells.  Last weekend, Breton team US Concarneau played St Etienne at Stade du Moustoir because their own home ground is not of sufficient standard for matches in Ligue 2; I am very excited to find evidence of the match behind the Tribune Lorient Agglomeration in the shape of the ‘ceremonial’ arch through which the teams would have run onto the pitch, I feel for a moment like Professor Alice Roberts discovering some archaeological wonder.

Back in our seats after our tour of the stadium, a ship’s siren or foghorn sounds three times to signal that there are just ten minutes until kick-off,  or coupe d’envoi to the French, and Paulene and I witness the mounting excitement of the build-up with a stirring Breton anthem, pyrotechnics, the Ligue 1 anthem played loudly over the PA system and multiple flag waving as the teams enter the pitch to line up before banners displaying both club crests and the Ligue 1 logo.  When the game eventually begins it feels like a massive anti-climax, just a few blokes tapping a ball about.

It’s Montpellier who get first go with the ball, attempting to send it mostly towards the most inland of the two goals.  Lorient are wearing their signature home kit of orange shirts, black shorts and white socks but Montpellier whose signature colours are orange and navy blue wear a change kit of all jade with aquamarine sleeves; it’s a bit of an odd or at least unusual ensemble and without the different coloured sleeves it would look washed out and awful.  Normally I would say “if you’re going to wear green, wear green” but I like Montpellier, so I let it go.  Although Montpellier’s Akor Adams heads straight at the Lorient goalkeeper after ten minutes, the first decent shot on goal takes eleven minutes to arrive and it’s Lorient who have it, with Vincent Le Goff sending a shot past the far post from an acute angle after a nippy run and pass from Julian Ponceau.  Three minutes later the first corner of the match goes to Lorient too, but the utterly enormous Isaak Toure sends a glancing header down towards the bottom corner of the Montpellier goal only for goalkeeper Benjamin Lecomte to make a spectacular diving save.  Toure wears a ludicrous number 95 shirt, but at 2.06m tall who’s going to tell him not to.

“Allez Lorientais, Lorientais” sing the home ultras off to our right in the Tribune B&B Hotels, fired by the early action but they just keep on singing and chanting without end, regardless of what happens on the pitch.  The game is settling down to a pattern of Montpellier playing slowly and patiently, frustrating eager Lorient who have occasional bursts of activity, racing forward excitingly only to be stopped by judicious interceptions and well-placed out-stretched boots.  It’s Lorient who first provoke referee Jeremy Stinat into whipping out his yellow card (carton jaune to the locals) however, as Ponceau fouls the wily Teji Savannier, a hugely skilful player who has never run about enough to attract the serious attention of English clubs.  Montpellier’s Wabi Khasri quietly goads a Lorient defender and pleads innocence as only Wabi Khasri can, and as he has done previously for St Etienne and Rennes and probably every club he’s ever played for .

Almost half the first half has gone when Montpellier win their first corner, and the ball is half-volleyed wide, and I am suddenly aware of how comfortable my seat is despite having no back, I think it must encourage good posture.  The bloke sat next to me is leaning forward and living every second of the match in a series of gallic shrugs greeting each free-kick and misplaced pass.  A half an hour has gone and suddenly Montpellier’s patience and quiet approach shatters and number 9 breaks away towards goal; he rounds the Lorient ‘keeper and then squares the ball to present Akor Adams with a simple tap in from a few yards. Montpelier lead 1-0 and seem to have just been biding their time.

The goal prompts Montassar Talbi to add to the tally of booked Lorient players as he drags down Adams and although the home team win another corner, Lorient’s Toure only manages to direct his seemingly unchallenged header straight to the waiting hands and gloves of Comte.  Two minutes of added on time don’t seem enough for Lorient to equalise, and despite some unexpected frantic attacking in which Theo Le Bris boots a shot against the Montpellier cross bar, they’re not.

With half-time there is a flood of parents and children to the back of the stand and some return clutching cardboard cartons of chips or re-usable plastic cups of cola; one or two never return, with forty-five minutes of football on a warm September afternoon evidently being enough.  We watch the stewards watching us and ponder whether one who looks a bit like the late actor Geoffrey Palmer, is wearing a wig or just has an elaborate and extensive comb-over; we decide we’d need to see him walking briskly towards the harbour into an on-shore breeze to truly decide.

At seven minutes past six the football resumes and very, very conspicuous by his absence is the gigantic number 95 for Lorient, Isaak Toure, who has surprisingly been replaced by Joel Mvuka, a man who according to the app on my mobile phone is a full thirty-three centimetres shorter and thirty-three kilograms lighter than him.  It seems likely it’s a tactical move by Lorient manager Regis Le Bris and Lorient start the half enthusiastically, pushing forward and pinning Montpellier in their own half much of the time.  The fifty sixth minutes arrives and the PA system suddenly lets out an almighty noise and the scoreboard flashes the word “Encouragement” and the number “56” as the crowd is urged to make a noise and encourage the team simply because fifty-six is the number of the Morbihan departement (like an English county) in which Lorient is situated.  The same thing happened at Brest last Saturday night when I was there, but in the 29^th minute, the Finisterre departement, where Brest is, being departement number twenty-nine.

The ultras have been noisily supporting their team from the start, so the fifty-sixth minute hasn’t made much difference to them, but the substitution of Vincent Le Goff with summer signing Benjamin Mendy two minutes later seems to excite the crowd, and Mendy seems like a decent signing for Lorient, even though he hasn’t played a competitive match for almost two years.  Hopefully, the poor treatment he has suffered in those two years will spur him on to repay Lorient for showing the sort of faith in him, which Manchester City apparently didn’t.  Mendy looks a bit larger than when he played for Monaco, but he clearly hasn’t lost his touch.

An hour has gone, and Montpellier pull back a booking with Maxime Esteve finding the sharp end of referee Jeremy Stinat’s pencil for a foul on Mvuka.  The game is still interesting, but neither team is making much of an impression on the other and with twenty-five minutes left there have been six substitutions, four for Lorient and two for Montpellier, who have replaced Wabi Khasri to peals of heartfelt booing from the home crowd.  Lorient win a corner which comes to nothing, and today’s attendance is announced over the PA system as being 13,492, with the scoreboard referring to us as supporters and supportrices.  I like that the French language still acknowledges that there are two sexes, and surmise that the French understand that human existence is all the better for it.   

The bloke sat next to me has been growing increasingly exasperated, groaning a turning away from the pitch as Lorient players dither on the ball or fail to spot the incisive passes.  Monsieur Stinat is not helping matters, but then it’s not really his job to do so, although he does make them a whole lot worse when in the seventy-first minute he awards Montpellier a penalty having seen Mousa Tamari fall to the ground as Igor Silva brushes against him.  It looks a bit harsh, or alternatively soft from my seat in the old Tribune d’Honneur, but after a small delay, in which the Lorient players surround Mr Stinat, presumably in an attempt to send good vibes through his earpiece to the VAR officials, the VAR officials however, confirm that it is a penalty.  Teji Savannier nonchalantly makes it 2-0 to Montpellier.

Lorient are mildly stung into action by the second goal and win a succession of three corners as they once again keep Montpellier in one half of the pitch, although Montpellier don’t ever look too bothered about it.  Lorient desperately make their fifth substitution whilst Montpellier make some substitutions too, but more just because they can, it takes time, and it⁹ breaks up the game.  Teji Savannier is one of the players to be substituted for Montpellier, and he looks like he could do with a bit of a rest.  Lorient make their own penalty claim as Sirine Doucoure falls to the ground alongside Montpellier’s Kiki Kouyate, but instead Mr Stinat awards the free kick to Kouyate.

A minute of normal time remains, plus any added on for administrative reasons.  Out on the right, Joris Chotard looks up and plays an angled pass through and behind the Lorient defence, which only Akor Adams reacts to; he runs on, takes the ball past the Lorient goalkeeper, checks back to dodge a defender and then rolls the ball into the unguarded Lorient goal. The bloke beside me groans in despair. Seven minutes of additional time is announced and almost all of it is played, and Montpellier win 3-0.

Montpellier deserve their win; they’ve played coolly and economically, and Lorient have not been good enough.   As many of the Montpellier supporters as can, balance themselves on the top of the steel fence that pens them in the corner of the stadium away to my left, most of them aren’t wearing shirts; they hail their conquering team.  At the other end of the ground the Lorient supporters hail their losing team as if they had won.

Once again Paulene and I have had a fab September afternoon at the Stade du Moustoir, it is a truly great place to watch a football match.  There has been so much about our afternoon that we have enjoyed from Lancelot beer and Breizh Cola to shuttered concrete and the last ‘Large’ orange T-shirt in the cub shop, but I think best of all is that Lorient’s club mascot is a Hake.