Blaquart has come out of the footballing shadows after leading the Crocodiles into the top flight for the first time in quarter of a century in 2018. Now aged 62, he has spent this season fighting to keep the club in the top flight, despite working with one of the smallest budgets in the division.

After finishing in the top half last season - a sporting miracle for a club of their size - Nîmes lost a host of key players last summer and Blaquart could have been forgiven for wanting to throw in the towel. They have spent most of this campaign in the bottom three and were stuck in the relegation play-off place when the season was suspended last week due to the coronavirus crisis.

In these circumstances, keeping the faith is crucial for Blaquart, and in that regard he need look no further than his elder brother, Jacques, who has been the Bishop of Orléans since 2010.

“I very quickly got into football but I have a lot of admiration for what my brother does,” Bernard said in a joint interview alongside Jacques, who is 68, with the newspaper La Croix.

The two are from a family of eight children from a village in the Charentes department of western France, and football and religion were constants for them growing up.

“We didn’t so much play street football as field football. We played all the time, anywhere: behind the church while waiting for Sunday school, in the school playground,” Bernard told La Croix.

Bernard may have opted for a career in football instead of the church, but up until fairly recently he was not the highest-profile Blaquart brother in the game. François Blaquart, now 66, has had a long career in youth development, rising to succeed Gérard Houllier as the National Technical Director for the French Football Federation in 2010. He was previously the assistant coach to Jacques Santini with the French national team.

Playing career curtailed by injury

Meanwhile, Bernard moved into youth development after ending his playing career prematurely due to injury. He notably played for Bordeaux, Toulouse and Toulon prior to hanging up his boots. After many years working in the amateur game, he had a spell at Grenoble and then moved to Tours, heading their academy before taking over the first-team post in Ligue 2 in 2012.

“I was a professional player like many of my colleagues, but I am different from them because I spent 20 years coaching amateur teams after having to cut short my playing career when I was 26 because of a ruptured Achilles tendon,” he told La Provence recently.

He has taken great pride in working with young players, and Olivier Giroud was one of those who came through at Grenoble when Blaquart was working there. Indeed, he has only established himself as a coach at the top level since moving to Nîmes in 2013, initially to work at their academy. He took over their first team in 2015 and his success since has been stunning, not least in his first season when he kept them in Ligue 2 despite having to deal with the handicap of an eight-point deduction.

Throughout it all, while taking some inspiration from religion, he insists that it plays no part in his job as a coach, telling Le Parisien: “I try to ensure that faith and religion are left at the door of the dressing room.”

However, everyone involved in French football right now is having to keep the faith somehow with a return to action some way off while the country is in lockdown, fighting to contain the spread of the coronavirus.

“We are sort of navigating without instruments, but if we have to stop playing for a month or a month and a half, then we will adapt. The main thing is that the season finishes, even if it is in mid-June or the end of June, it doesn’t matter. The most important thing right now is the health situation. Everything else needs to be put into perspective,” he said last week.