Alex McLeish answers his phone to a familiar voice.
“I knew this agent who would always phone and say: ‘Listen, I’ve got a cracker for you’,” he recounted. “I must say, not all the time was it actually a cracker.”
Hibs fans will be forever grateful he did not simply hang up before being asked if he was familiar with the name Franck Sauzee.
“Of course I know him, for God’s sake!”
An 18-year-old Tam McManus is scrubbing away in the Easter Road bootroom, glancing at the door to catch a glimpse of someone who absolutely can’t be who he thinks it is, walking side-by-side with McLeish.
He turns to his fellow boot polishers: “Here, I think that was Franck Sauzee.”
“No chance.”
“I’m telling you, it’s Franck Sauzee.”
It probably shouldn’t have been Franck Sauzee.
Early 1999: Hibs had been relegated to the First Division the previous season, an awful long way from representing France and winning the Champions League with Marseille.
He may have been approaching 34 by the time he departed Montpellier under a cloud, but Sauzee did not want for offers in Europe and beyond. Brazil must have been a tempting prospect, yet it was a sit down with an old international foe which convinced him that Leith, not Rio, was the place for one last hurrah.
“I knew at the time he was at a stage in his career where he was leaving the bigger clubs but still had a real hunger for football,” said McLeish. “The agent said he could get him on a free transfer for us.
“The wages weren’t big compared to the modern day, but it was quite big for Hibs at the time. The fact we didn’t have to spend a fee was fantastic, so we were actually able to do it with ease.
“Rod Petrie was chief-executive and we were trying to get back into the Premier Division, I had told him that two or three players could really change the face of the team.
“When I sat down with Franck to see if he would sign, I told him all about his career and he was amazed: ‘How do you know all about my career? This is unbelievable, coach!’
“That I knew all the information made an impression on him. I told him I’d been buying the World Soccer magazine since I was about 10 years old, and I just kept all the information in my head.
“Signing Franck was a no-brainer, even though he wasn’t in his young Marseille days any more. He was very enthusiastic about coming to Hibs.
“I think he was a bit pissed off with the last team he played for, he’d fallen out with the manager. But him and I became good friends.”
'It's like he was telepathic'
There was, however, still the possibility that time had caught up even with Sauzee. Knowing there could be an element of risk, two team sheets were pinned to the dressing room wall at Easter Road one fateful morning.
Leading one XI was Sauzee, and in the other a pair of young upstarts in McManus and Kenny Miller – essentially two lab assistants in this experiment to determine whether he still had ‘the legs’.
“Kenny and I were probably the two fastest players at the club at that time,” said McManus. “Kenny was more established than me, but in terms of pace, we were similar.
“The gaffer must have wanted to see if Franck could still run. If you’d put me and Kenny in a straight line 100 metre sprint against Franck, we could probably have given him a 30-metre start and still beat him.
“But neither of us got in behind him the whole game. It was like he was telepathic; he knew exactly when and where we were going to run.
“If our team had the ball and I turned to go in behind, he was already standing there, there was no way past him.
“His passing was different class, and he could still run. He was up against the two fastest guys at the club and neither of us could get in behind him, he read the game so well.
“That was the first time I’d come across Franck Sauzee, and he’s probably the best I’ve ever played with – and I played with a lot of good players.”
McManus will not be alone in that sentiment. Sauzee’s near-mythical presence still hangs over Easter Road to this day, immortalised as ‘Le God’ in the eyes of supporters.
When his signing was officially announced in February 1999, Hibs were already cantering to the First Division trophy, so much you so you could argue it was unfair adding Sauzee’s class to a potent mix that already included the unpredictable Russell Latapy tormenting defenders, plus Mixu Paatelainen and Stevie Crawford scoring almost 30 goals between them.
Hibs wrapped up the title by April. They did not necessarily need Sauzee at that moment, but that did not stop him leaving his new team-mates awestruck. He was elegance personified, but his 80s heyday ensured an old school edge was retained in those famous boots.
Literally.
“He had the hardest side-foot pass I’ve ever seen,” McManus laughs. “I cleaned his boots and he had these adidas Copa Mundials, but he took the rubber studs out and replaced them with metal inserts, and they weighed about three kilos per boot.
“I’d never seen anything like it, I’ve no idea how he ran in them. They were like Cuba Gooding Jr’s diving boots in Men of Honor, they were so heavy.
“I think that’s why he had such a hard side-foot pass and shot. Even if he passed the ball from 10 yards away, it absolutely fired at you because there was so much weight in his boots.”
'He was one of the boys'
Sauzee’s transition into an eclectic Hibs dressing room was as seamless as assuming position at the base of midfield. Given his storied background, joining a group where players would return from the training pitch to find their shoes nailed to the floor might well have bewildered him.
“Poor Dirk Lehmann,” McLeish recalls. “He nearly broke his back trying to lift them up.”
But Sauzee loved it, loved Edinburgh, and loved the club. It was the perfect match; Sauzee invigorated Hibs, and Hibs invigorated Sauzee.
“He integrated with the lads superbly, the likes of big Yogi and all the banter,” says McLeish. “Mind you, he found it very hard to understand him. There was no filter with some of these guys.
“They would try to nutmeg Franck on the training ground, to try and make Le God finally look ordinary. There were so many pranks and laughs in the dressing room, and Franck was part of all that.
“He is a really nice guy. He tried his best to understand the Scottish accents and I tried to practice my best English voice. But his English was good and after a year or two he mastered Scottish as well!”
One pre-season, McLeish took his team to Germany for a training camp.
“On the last night he told us we could go out,” McManus remembers. “It ended up a mega bevvy session, and we ended up back in the hotel with crates of beer.
“Franck and Mixu were rooming together, and all of a sudden Mixu started shaving boys’ heads, just walking right up to them with a pair of clippers.
“Most of the boys ended up with shaved heads, but I was 19 and so f*****g vain that I didn’t want a skinhead. Franck and Mixu were chasing me down corridors with the clippers, luckily I was too quick quick for them.
“There’s a team photo where half the players are bald, and Franck was one of them. He was one of the boys, as well, and we loved that.”
'Franck took that really badly'
Sauzee’s exploits on the pitch for Hibs have been recounted time and again, finding their way into songs and books. A McLeish epiphany in summer 2000 dropped him into a back three in which he thrived, his goals and leadership turning a derby tide that had so long moved in Hearts’ favour back towards the green half of Edinburgh.
With Sauzee in the team, Hibs never lost an encounter with their great rivals. He became captain, a de-facto manager on the pitch, yet a comparatively quieter but still vastly respected influence off it.
His team-mates reported for a derby in October 2000 to find Sauzee had loaded a crate of champagne into the dressing room. “This is for afterwards,” he declared. Cognisant of the considerable disparity in drinking culture from France to Scotland, McLeish couldn’t help but worry it would set a hard-to-reverse trend: “I said to him: ‘Listen Frank, here in Scotland if you start giving these guys a bevvy, they’ll just want more, and more, and more!’
“I don’t think the Scotsman is the same as the Frenchman. The Frenchman has a sip of champagne and gets on with it, our boys wanted another four bottles.
“Half of them were saying: ‘Gaffer this a brilliant idea, I’ll be bringing a carry out in for my birthday next week’.”
Needless to say, Hibs romped to a 6-2 win in the ‘Millenium Derby’, perhaps the peak for a team which was as thrillingly intoxicating as it was unpredictable. In Sauzee’s two full seasons in the top-flight, Celtic and Rangers would be put to the sword as well, but those results were at odds with an occasional tendency to lose unexpectedly heavily. It was rarely dull.
His time on Leith, of course, did not receive the fairytale ending it deserved, with Sauzee appointed manager after McLeish’s departure to Rangers, only to be sacked 69 days later.
“Franck took that really badly,” says McManus. Sauzee would not return to Easter Road for over 20 years. But ‘Le God’s’ legacy went beyond results, with the man leaving as long-lasting an impression as the footballer. McLeish recalls younger players being starstruck by his presence, but he was a figure acutely aware of his own influence.
“He was quiet, but when he got angry or had something to say, people would shut up,” says McManus. “It was case of: ‘we better listen here, this is Franck Sauzee.’ He wasn’t loud like Yogi or Mixu, but when he said something, it meant a lot.
“I remember we played Dundee United in the second game of the season, I was on the bench and Franck came up to me and said: ‘Tom, you’re going to score your first goal for Hibs today’.
“I was like: ‘whit?’ We went 2-0 up and I came on for the last 20 minutes, John O’Neil slipped me through and I scored.
“Ian Murray will never let me forget this. We came through the ranks together and he was the first person over to me after I scored, but I pushed him out the way so I could run towards Franck. I’ve got a great picture of me jumping on top of Franck, but Ian still calls me a b*****d for shoving him off.”
It’s hard to blame him. After all, there’s only one Sauzee.
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