Guillaume the conqueror

ANDREW SMITH

IT IS almost obligatory for any new Edinburgh resident to wax lyrical over the cultural backdrop that the castle, the festival and the tattoo give to the city. Le Havre emigre Guillaume Beuzelin, as he has been proving with his own cultured interventions in Hibernian’s midfield, is a little different. Tattoos - plural - have revealed to him the character of Scotland’s capital.

"I’m always running into fans with Hibs tattoos," he says. "They have tattoos here [he points to his arm], here, [he points to his chest] and even here [he points to his leg]. I was amazed by this. You never see that in France. You get people coming up and asking to have their photo taken, but never tattoos."

Beuzelin might have to be prepared to have his limbs imprinted black and blue today. Little else can be expected when Hibs’ put their eight-game unbeaten run on the line in the first Edinburgh league derby of the season at the Tynecastle bear pit. But the mark that the Easter Road club have made on the 25-year-old could be even more indelible than the one the playmaker has made on the team he joined three months ago.

Since cutting his ties with the port town founded by Renaissance king Francois I, where he was born, raised and played his football from the age of six, he has become the fulcrum of Hibs’ renaissance under Tony Mowbray.

Indeed, the moment the player signed a two-year contract following a successful loan spell, the Edinburgh club’s manager declared he had unearthed "a gem", "a diamond". His charges would appear to agree, club captain Ian Murray likening Beuzelin to Hibs’ demigod Franck Sauzee because of his "incredibly quick feet" and his kestrel-eye for the short, telling pass.

Yet the sparkle in Beuzelin’s eyes when discussing his horizon-widening stint overseas suggests he is deriving as much pleasure from the precious commodity of playing for a passionate support as is true in reverse. Although anything but flashy, in one of his early outings he produced a piece of ball trickery that was trumpeted as positively Ronaldinho-esque in various Hibs fans’ websites.

It was anything but a moment of self-indulgence. "It is something I do a lot in training but I’d never dared to try it in a match in France," he explains. "But I’ve been feeling so good about my game, I thought I’d give it a go. I was right in front of my own supporters so I wanted to do something to make them happy. My confidence levels are high. The boss has shown he is confident in me and I am playing in the centre of midfield, the ‘axis’, where I never played for Le Havre. My team-mates have confidence in me, the fans are supporting me, so let’s go."

It is curious to consider that Beuzelin’s career seemed to be going nowhere in particular until a change of coach at Le Havre in the close season led him to feel uncertain about his future. In turn, Mowbray was informed about Beuzelin’s availability by the player’s agent, which precipitated his Scottish move.

It was to prove a move away from what he had always known both on and off the pitch. Le Havre’s ground was only 100 metres from his family home. He would look out of his window and gaze towards a club that was the team of his father, his two brothers and generations of Beuzelins before them. "I never thought of leaving Le Havre to go elsewhere in France. They were my club and I never missed a game as a kid," he says.

They were also the club of Rangers’ Jean-Alain Boumsong, Momo Sylla of Celtic and Dundee United’s Karim Kerkar as Beuzelin made his way through the ranks; the trio have all been in phone contact with him as he has settled into a new life. The one he had left behind, in truth provided few highlights in a playing sense. After turning professional six years ago, in only two seasons - 1998-99 and 2002-2003 - did Le Havre even compete in the French upper tier. "We had a young team so it was very difficult to get results in the top division," he said. "Mind you, when I say young I mean 21 or 22. It is amazing that at Hibs we have teenagers in the side. I feel like an old man."

The days he recalls with relish from his time with his hometown club date back to when he was young. In his debut season as a professional he netted his first senior goal in a 3-1 home win over Paris Saint Germain. "My family and friends were in the stadium watching. It was a great moment," he says. Shortly afterwards, he netted against a Monaco side who had Fabien Barthez in goal. "He had just come back from winning the World Cup so that was special too," Beuzelin recalls.

Slim pickings from five years’ worth of first-team football, maybe he was forever destined to make the trip across the English channel from his Normandy base to pursue greater security. For this isle features heavily in his upbringing. "My first football hero was Chris Waddle. I used to watch him and Jean-Pierre Papin on television for Marseille when they were among the best teams in Europe. Waddle would whoosh all over the pitch."

Whooshing would seem an appropriate word for him to use as he reflects on the proximity of his hometown port to Britain, his current place of employment. "The boat from Le Havre goes to Southampton and Portsmouth, so it is easy to get across and go to London, and vice-versa," he says. "We always seem to have lots of English people coming over on motorbikes. It is a good thing; it helps strengthen the relationship between England and France. When I was younger I used to go over a lot, but then football kept me too busy."

That it did so is because more than a century before, in 1872 to be precise, students from Cambridge and Oxford set up a football team in Le Havre. It is for this reason that dark and light blue stripes remain the colours of France’s oldest football club. Then, clearly, the country was an importer when it came to the game. Now, the traffic heads in the other direction. No doubt this is attributable, in part, to there being currently around two million players registered with the French Football Federation. Perhaps the huge number of performers regularly churned out by the French system is why more players with Gallic associations than those of any other national heritage have washed up in Scotland.

Although Hearts are considered to have been foremost in Edinburgh in continuing the Auld Alliance through the national sport, a fair number of Frenchmen have ended up down Leith way. In the past decade, in fact, David Zitelli, Freddy Arpinon, Yannick Zambernardi and Matthias Doumbe, aside from the peerless Sauzee, have given varying degrees of service to Hibs.

Beuzelin is uncomfortable with the notion that he may be carrying on a recent tradition. "I hope so but couldn’t really say," he says. "I think the fact that French players, like Sauzee, have done well here has helped me and made it easier to gain acceptance from the fans. In France, the passion for football in Scotland is common knowledge and perhaps why there is this movement. A couple of weeks ago I went back to Le Havre to speak to my old team-mates and now all of them want to come to Scotland. Edinburgh is a good city to live and work if you are French because there so many fellow nationals here."

In recent days, Beuzelin has moved into a flat near the Holyrood parliament - "that cost a lot of money, right?" he says - but it is an abode he will live in alone. Last month it was reported that his girlfriend Nora and their four-year-old Dalmatian, Cafu, named after Milan’s Brazilian full-back, would be joining him in the Scottish capital. Since then, though, the player’s relationship has become a casualty of his career change.

"With my girlfriend it is finished but it is not a problem. That’s life," he says. "I thought it would be more difficult being alone here but the Scottish people have been very friendly to me. I feel like I have a new family here."

At Hibs he is now part of a family which he knows can make a mark on fans’ affections.

Taken from the Scotsman