René Llense

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René Llense (born July 14, 1913 in Collioure , † March 12, 2014 in Sète ) was a French football player . He played in the position of goalkeeper .

Club career

At the age of seven, René Llense moved with his mother from the Pyrénées-Orientales department to Cette , where he joined the local football club, which was one of the strongest in the country in the 1920s. When professional football was introduced in France in 1932, FC Sète, and with it Llense, were also admitted to Division 1 . In the following season, the "Dauphins" - the club's nickname, which is still popular today - succeeded as the first club in the history of French football to win the Doublé : The team, with numerous Southeastern Europeans such as Yvan Beck , István Lukács and Márton Bukovi , was primarily an offensive team finished the league games as champions before SC Fives and also won the national cup competition with a 2-1 final win over Olympique Marseille . In the summer of 1934 René Llense was appointed to the squad of the French national team for the first time (see below) , because FC Sète had the defense with the fewest goals this season. Typical characteristics of the goalkeeper were his posture when he looked like a cat about to jump in anticipation of a cross or a corner, and his frequent, wide defense with the fist. In the following seasons Sète could not build on this double triumph again despite a number of well-known reinforcements ( Vollweiler , Weiskopf , Ben Bouali , Koranyi ); a third place in 1938 in the top division was the best placement. Last season Llense even suffered a goal from a goalkeeper colleague: his opponent, Marseille's Jaguaré Vasconcelos, gave him a penalty .

Like many - especially the French - professional players, Llense could not afford a particularly lush lifestyle from the payments from his club; after all, his income was about twice that of a skilled worker. He earned a little extra money through product advertising and, for example, together with Yvan Beck advertised the Suze aperitif , which he advertised on posters with the words "Suze is my favorite because of its flowery aroma of my Pyrenees". In addition, alongside Edmond Delfour , Raoul Diagne , Alfred Aston , Étienne Mattler and the spiritus rector Jacques Mairesse, he was one of the professionals who set up a players' union, the Amicale des joueurs professionnels , in 1936 in order to have more influence on their contractual and working conditions to get. At the turn of the year 1937/38 they even threatened the football association with a boycott of the international match against Belgium; this was essentially unsuccessful, and a strong advocacy of professional footballers did not emerge in France until 25 years later.

1938 FC Sète sold his keeper to the straight out of the second division ascended AS Saint-Etienne , where he met again his pal Beck. The team was considered a “millionaire eleven” because they traveled to away games in the second instead of the usual third car class . In Llense's first season she finished in a very respectable fourth place behind Sète, Marseille and Racing Paris . Then the outbreak of war and the German occupation not only interrupted the career of the goalkeeper who was called to arms. Not until 1942 did he play games for ASSE again. In terms of sport, this time was of inferior value despite a strong team again - which names like Tax , Snella , Rodriguez and, towards the end of the war, Cuissard or Alpsteg stand for - solely because the championships in the divided country do not have a uniform league and no titles that are still officially recognized today made possible. A fifth place in 1943 in the southern season of Division 1 was Saint-Étienne's best result. Even in the cup competition, René Llense and the team did not get beyond the quarter-finals of the unoccupied zone. In 1945 he ended his career.

Stations

In the national team

Between February 1935 and January 1939, René Llense played as goalkeeper eleven full international matches for France , including one each against Switzerland (1: 2 in October 1935), against Austria (1: 2 in January 1937) and three games against Belgium (1 : 1 in April 1935, 1: 3 in February 1937 and 5: 3 in January 1938).

As early as the summer of 1934 he had been appointed to the Bleus squad for the world championship finals . He was just as rarely used in Italy as it was four years later at the World Cup in his own country , where he was again in the French squad : in 1934 Alex Thépot , in 1938 Laurent Di Lorto, was preferred to Llense.

Palmarès

  • French champion: 1934
  • French cup winner: 1934
  • 11 senior international matches (no hit) for France; World Cup participants in 1934, 1938

Life after the active time

Lenses' career, like so many others during the Second World War, ended prematurely. He later worked for a long time as a physical education teacher for the employees of the aluminum manufacturer Pechiney in Saint-Jean-de-Maurienne before settling in Sète . In retrospect, he referred to the Czechoslovak František Plánička as his role model , whom he had met personally in a friendly game in 1932. In 2013 Llense, the oldest French international player still alive, celebrated his centenary in his house in Sète's La Corniche district; the offer of the president of his ex-club from Saint-Étienne to pick him up for an ASSE game, he had to refuse for reasons of his limited mobility.

literature

  • Denis Chaumier: Les Bleus. Tous les joueurs de l'équipe de France de 1904 à nos jours. Larousse, o. O. 2004 ISBN 2-03-505420-6
  • L'Équipe / Gérard Ejnès: La belle histoire. L'équipe de France de football. L'Équipe, Issy-les-Moulineaux 2004 ISBN 2-951-96053-0
  • Frédéric Parmentier: AS Saint-Étienne, histoire d'une légende. Cahiers intempestifs, Saint-Étienne 2004 ISBN 2-911698-31-2
  • Alfred Wahl / Pierre Lanfranchi: Les footballeurs professionnels des années trente à nos jours. Hachette, Paris 1995 ISBN 978-2-0123-5098-4

Web links

Remarks

  1. Chaumier, p. 198
  2. Wahl / Lanfranchi, p. 63f.
  3. Wahl / Lanfranchi, p. 69
  4. Parmentier, p. 38
  5. A photo of this 1939 team can be found in Pierre Delaunay / Jacques de Ryswick / Jean Cornu: 100 ans de football en France. Atlas, Paris 1982, 1983² ISBN 2-7312-0108-8 , p. 162
  6. Parmentier, pp. 273-276.
  7. L'Équipe / Ejnès, pp. 305-308.
  8. A photo of the 1938 World Cup line-up can be found in L'Équipe / Ejnès, p. 59.
  9. Chaumier, p. 198
  10. France Football of October 23, 2012, p. 6
  11. according to the article of August 17, 2013 from the Midi Libre
  12. France Football, July 16, 2013, p. 12