PARIS—See, now this is football. No 53-man rosters. No helmets or shoulder pads or radios in the offensive captain’s ear. No touching the ball with your hands on the field of play, period (unless you wear a silly shirt and gloves). No timeouts. Certainly no video crews covertly taping other teams’ practices. Sure, Europe’s top football clubs can’t exactly take the moral high ground on that last point; they have been known to fix a match or two. But the most important fact stands alone: this game of football, the one they play east of the Atlantic (and southwest of it, and southeast of it, and pretty much everywhere else in the world except North America) is played with the feet.

I’ve been in Paris for a week now, and find myself adopting the local customs at a furious rate to make the city feel like home as quickly as possible. The temptation is great for this column to devolve into something silly and predictable: pronouncements of “my bread is better than your bread� (it is), “my coffee is better than your coffee� (debatable, but probably true), or “my football is better than your football.�

In this last instance, I’m going to abstain from judgment by reason of cultural relativism. I’m still reading online articles and columns on the NFL and the NBA, preparing my fantasy baseball league, and checking the Vancouver Canucks box scores. Just because I live in Europe doesn’t mean I’m going to jump ship from the sports I’ve grown up following, even though everyone around me might judge them irrelevant, and even though none of the actual contests occur during normal waking hours in my own time zone. That never stopped me before.

I will follow the “When In Paris…â€? edict and immerse myself in the sports that matter around here — the ones people talk about, write about, argue about and gather in bars to watch together. Communal viewing is one of the great elements of sporting life. And so I found myself Wednesday night in a bar called The Wall, in the Latin Quarter’s Place de la Contrescarpe (one of Hemingway’s beloved drinking spots, along with seemingly every other neighbourhood in Paris), to watch the Champions League match between Manchester United and hosts Olympique Lyonnais, the only French squad left in the final sixteen of Europe’s premier club football tournament.

In France, football is unquestionably king. And especially so this week, at the knockout stage of the Champions League, a brilliant construction that brings together top clubs from Europe’s domestic leagues for an extended tournament to crown the continent’s best professional team. Or, as the official Sportstrotter fiancée coined it: “the sporting equivalent of the classic comic book question, Who would win in a fight between Batman and Superman?�

If we consider Superman the presumptive favourite in this matchup — since he’s, well, fracking Superman — then Manchester United, also sporting a red costume, was the team to beat on Wednesday night. The Mancunians feature arguably the world’s best player — the slick, shifty Portuguese assassin Cristiano Ronaldo — and a roster full of high-priced transnational superstars (among them Rooney, Van der Sar and Tevez). And Olympique Lyonnais, playing the role of the Dark Knight in their black kits, had to be considered the underdogs despite being the clear class of France’s Ligue 1 for the past half-decade.

As mentioned, sixteen clubs remain in the Champions League draw, and all eight pairs of teams played the first game of a home-and-home series either Tuesday or Wednesday night. Liverpool surprised this year’s dominant European side, Inter Milan, 2-0 on Tuesday, and FC Barcelona trumped Glasgow’s Celtic in a wild 3-2 contest on Wednesday. But Parisians were fixed on the Lyon-Manchester match, and by the time the game kicked off The Wall’s back room was packed with young men all turned to face the plasma screen.

Lyon stuck with Manchester through the opening minutes, trading possessions and quickly convincing themselves they belonged on the same pitch as the Red Devils. After a scoreless first half, the optimism grew (“We’ve stayed in the match this long, maybe we can steal a goalless draw!�) and when, in the 54th minute, 20-year-old French scoring sensation Karim Benzema rocketed a ball from just outside the 18-yard box into the back of the Manchester net, banking it off Van der Saar’s left post, the bar erupted.

That’s the thing about football: it’s fundamentally different from baseball or basketball or the NFL, which are thrilling for their sense of anticipation as actions builds towards a big moment or a big showdown that you can see coming from a mile away — think first-and-goal, or a bases-loaded at bat. But in football, as in hockey, fans must follow the action at every point, whether points are scored or not (most of the time, not), and hope that their perseverance is rewarded with that one decisive moment. It frequently materializes from a single inspired and unexpected maneuver, out of thin air. In short, it’s action a Canadian could really grow to love.

Benzema’s strike, coming so quickly off his boot with minimal buildup, was one of those moments. The crowd at The Wall, chatty and modestly attentive up to that point, exploded as the ball found the back of the net. Everyone stood up and yelled at one precise instant, creating cacophony where there had been but hushed anticipation. It was as if a jolt of electric current had been delivered simultaneously to every seat in the house. I had real live shivers and visible goosebumps.

Everything went to plan following the goal until the Argentinean substitute Carlos Tévez notched a late equalizer just three minutes from time; a heartbreaker for Lyon. The jovial mood in the bar dropped rapidly and a single voice in the corner of the room, hiding behind a post no less, let forth a chant of “Allons-y Manchester!� that was quickly met with a bitter chorus of “Ferme ta gueule!� from the pro-Lyon crowd.

The sixteen remaining teams will play the second leg of their home-and-home series in two weeks, and Manchester is now in the driver’s seat heading home, since ‘away goals’ break ties — so, if Manchester and Lyon draw 0-0 at Old Trafford, producing a two-match score of 1-1, Manchester will advance on their greater number of goals scored on the road. Still, there is hope for French football fans–their last remaining Champions League team still has a fighting chance.

As the Tuesday editorial in my new daily read, the sporting newspaper l’Equipe (more on my favourite French newspaper next week), put it: “Since UEFA reinstituted knockout matches in the round of 16 of the Champions League, the last month of winter has become a little less painful to endure.�

Of course, this pronouncement probably flowed better in the original, lyrical French than it does in my broken, translated English. But I’m not going to judge.

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Posted on Friday, February 22nd, 2008 at 12:45 pm. Follow comments through the RSS 2.0 feed. Comment or trackback.