On Tuesday AS Saint-Etienne announced the appointment of Pascal Dupraz as new head coach, tasking the former Evian, Toulouse and Caen coach with pulling the side off the bottom of the Ligue 1 Uber Eats table.
Pascal Dupraz (59) succeeds Claude Puel, who was sacked at the start of December, on the AS Saint-Etienne bench. The coach from the Haute-Savoie region of France has signed a six-month deal through to June 2022. He will take up his post on Wednesday, following the end of a one-week interim period with Julien Sablé in charge, the club said.
Five years ago, Pascal Dupraz took charge at Toulouse FC as they sat at the bottom of the Ligue 1 Uber Eats table. Under his guidance, Le Téfécé managed to overcome a ten-point gap to beat relegation on the last day of the season, fuelled by a pre-match talk that is still engraved in the memories of those present.
Leader of men
It is a new challenge that awaits him in Saint-Etienne: les Verts have only won two games this season and are on a run of four consecutive defeats. A challenge tailored to this Haut-Savoyard with a reputation as a leader of men, with a sharp sense of order. He was a professional player at Sochaux, Thonon, Brest, Mulhouse, Toulon and Gueugnon, playing 180 games in the top flight.
But as a coach, he has been most successful in the lower divisions. Dupraz was one of the cornerstones of the Evian-Thonon-Gaillard FC project, formed around several club mergers in the Chablais and Genevois regions with the support of the Danone group.
He arrived in 1991 to finish his playing career when the club was only FC Gaillard in the Regional Honneur (D7), and became its coach in the Honneur (D6), contributing to its promotion to the National under the banner of the Croix-de-Savoie, in 2006. With Pascal Dupraz on the bench, the team went down to National 2 (D4) before going back up to the National (D3) two years later (2008). He then became sporting director (2009-2012) at the club that had by that stage become ETG FC.
He returned as coach in early September 2012, succeeding Pablo Correa, but was sacked in 2015, the year the club was relegated to Ligue 2 BKT, after a Coupe de France final in 2013, lost to Bordeaux (3-2). More recently, Dupraz, who will be reunited with Saint-Etienne executive chairman Jean-Francois Soucasse, whom he knew at Toulouse as general manager, returned to work at Caen in Ligue 2 BKT. But he was sacked last March, when Stade Malherbe were 14th in the standings.
ASSE will play at Lyon-La Duchère (N2, D4) on Sunday in the Coupe de France before playing host to Nantes on 22 December - Dupraz's first Ligue 1 Uber Eats match in charge - for Saint-Etienne's final match of 2021. Dupraz will then have the winter break to get his side's ducks in a row before returning to action for the second half of the season with the mission of preventing Ligue 1 Uber Eats' most successful club (ten titles) from a first relegation since 2001.
