Emiliano Sala: In Nantes, tears, emotion and solidarity as supporters cling to the faintest of hope
Émilie Tissot, an 18-year-old Nantes supporter, managed to utter two sentences before bursting into tears.
She had come with her family, and hundreds of fellow supporters, to Place Royale in the middle of Nantes for a vigil in honour of Emiliano Sala, the former Nantes striker whose plane disappeared over the English Channel on Monday night.
“He was adorable,” Tissot said, smudging the tears across her cheeks. “I loved going to the training sessions to meet the players. Sala was shy and reserved, but he was always there for the supporters. I’ve been crying since this morning.”
Over a thousand Nantes supporters descended upon Place Royale on Tuesday evening, congregating around the giant granite fountain that has stood in the centre of the square since 1865. Some wore yellow Nantes shirts with Sala’s name on the back. Many laid down yellow flowers and candles. On the ground lay a green and gold Nantes flag, beside it an Argentinian one. In a card left inside one of the bouquets, someone had written: “Emiliano Sala, forever Nantais.” Several fans could be seen wiping away tears.
LIVE: Latest updates as search for Emiliano Sala's missing plane resumes
Uncertainty hung in the cold air. Sala was missing, presumed dead, but this was a vigil, not a wake. Fans absent-mindedly slipped from past tense into present tense and back again as they paid their tributes. He had been in the city, saying his goodbyes, only a day before.
“He’d left, but he hadn’t left,” said Thierry, Émilie’s father. “We saw him play a week ago, against Nîmes. He was here last night to say goodbye. Being here makes us realise it’s real. But I still don’t believe it.”
The fans on the square stood in silence in the darkness, some with their arms around each other, some with scarves held aloft. Periodically the silence was broken by chants of Sala’s name, followed by applause. Then silence again, the only noise the sound of the water streaming down the fountain.
Hugo, 30, set down a candle at the foot of the fountain before pausing to observe the tributes.
“I really liked him as a player,” he said. “He was very humble and he gave everything. I always thought he must have been a nice guy to know. It must be very hard for his friends.”
Sala, 28, has spent his entire career in France, having signed for Bordeaux at the age of 20 from an affiliated youth academy, Proyecto Crecer, in Argentina. He was successively loaned out to Orléans, Niort and Caen before joining Nantes on a permanent basis in the summer of 2015.
A tall, angular centre-forward with rough-edged technique, Sala was not blessed with the skills of some of his celebrated compatriots, but he captured hearts at Nantes’ Stade de la Beaujoire with his faultless work ethic and fierce will to win.
With 12 goals in Ligue 1 this season, he had already matched his best figures in a Nantes shirt. Whilst there was inevitable disappointment at Nantes’ decision to sell him to Cardiff City, there was also an acceptance that he had earned the right to leave.
Julien Chartier, 28, placed a bouquet of white roses beside the other floral tributes. He had wanted to buy yellow flowers, but the florist had sold out.
“I can’t remember another Nantes striker who expressed so much joy after each goal,” he said. “You could tell he was an Argentinian; he had that grinta. That’s what everyone will remember. I’m sure if you’d said, ‘If you cut your finger off, Nantes will be champions of France,’ he’d have done it.”
For Nantes supporters of a certain age, Sala’s disappearance brought to mind a tragic car accident in November 1984 that took the lives of promising defender Seth Adonkor, half-brother of Marcel Desailly, and youth-team player Jean-Michel Labejof. The city had already spent weeks in mourning last year after Henri Michel, emblematic Nantes captain of the 1970s, and Philippe Gondet, the club’s second-highest goal-scorer, died within three months of each other at the beginning of the year.
Nantes’ third-highest goal-scorer, Vahid Halilhodžić, is their current head coach. He spoke briefly to regional newspaper La Voix du Nord as he left the club’s Jonèliere training centre on Tuesday afternoon, confiding that he and his colleagues were “expecting the worst”.
The Nantes players left the training ground without saying a word to the journalists waiting outside. The training sessions scheduled to take place on Tuesday and Wednesday have been cancelled and Wednesday night’s game against third-tier L'Entente Sannois Saint-Gratien in the French Cup has been postponed until Sunday.
On Place Royale, as night set in and the temperatures continued to drop, those in the thinning crowd clung to the desperately faint hope that, somehow, Sala’s fighting spirit might yet see him through.
“He was a fighter,” said Chartier. “He wasn’t someone who accepted defeat. That’s why we all have a glimmer of hope. But it’s difficult to imagine.”
It was hard enough for Nantes’ supporters to say au revoir to Emiliano Sala. Now they are summoning the strength to say adieu.