By David Owen
September 14 – Another small slice of football history was made on Friday night, as Corinne Diacre’s Clermont Foot beat Le Havre in the second division of the French championship.
The narrow 1-0 win was Clermont’s first league success of the season at their sixth attempt, and lifted them off rock bottom in the table. As such it was the first league victory presided over by Diacre, 40, since she last month became the first woman to coach a men’s professional team in a competitive match in a major European country.
“That does us good, even if it was difficult until the end,” she said of the win that lifted Clermont to 17th in the table. “They played a big match tonight. Their state of mind was truly irreproachable. We had to win tonight. It was our objective. We did it.”
Though they have yet to lose by more than a single goal, Clermont’s form has been better in the French League Cup. The next round of that competition sees them bracketed with Ligue 1’s Caen in a game scheduled for the end of next month.
Clermont’s win over Le Havre came less than a week after another woman manager – Shelley Kerr of the University of Stirling in Scotland’s fifth-tier Lowland League – notched her first victory. Her team has now followed this up with a 3-2 away win over BSC Glasgow.
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