"Eric Pédat, what a legend! What a photo!" says Jérémy Frick. Pédat was the last Servette captain to hold up the trophy in 1999. Will Frick follow his great role model next summer?
Servette are one of the hottest contenders for the title this season. 25 years after the last championship.
In the summer of 1999, goalkeeper and captain Eric Pédat lifted the trophy. The 5:2 win in Lausanne (triple goal scorer Vurens and double Petrov) is the icing on the cake of a sensational season.
A season that today's Servette goalkeeper and captain Jérémy Frick remembers fondly. The then 6-year-old always sat behind the goal of his great idol Pédat at home games with his brother and admired him. "He was my biggest role model. Pédat always threw himself into balls and duels with such courage and fearlessness. And then that presence. I always wanted to be like him," Frick tells blue Sport.
Frick stands in front of a large black-and-white picture of Pédat and the championship trophy in the corridor in front of the boxes at the Stade de Genève. "What a legend! What a photo," he says.
It would of course be a dream that one day a photo of him and the championship trophy would hang on the ancestral wall, says Frick. "A colleague recently told me: 'If you lift the trophy, you've made it. The kid who always wanted to be like Pédat has made it."
Frick is still a long way from reaching his goal with Servette. At the end of the preliminary round, there are more teams at the top of the league than there have been for a long time.