PARIS—Whoever proclaimed this a city of cool, hip, even-tempered sophisticates (um, that was probably me) obviously had yet to attend a football match alongside the inflamed ultras of Paris Saint-Germain. Well, I’m a PSG virgin no longer, and will wholeheartedly concede that the rowdy fans of the local sports team can lose their minds with the best of them.
Normally, a late-season game between two of a league’s bottomfeeders, in this case Paris and Racing Club de Strasbourg of France’s Ligue 1, holds little significance. Or at least, this was my impression, having been brought up in the world of antitrust-exempt North American sports (really, what’s more sporting than a competition-free business model? Freedom, baby—whoo!).
Here in Europe—and I know, I promised when I arrived here that these dispatches wouldn’t devolve into “they do [blank] better here, you know�—but, here in the open leagues of Europe, they have this marvellous invention: promotion and relegation. Two words that the Kansas City Royals, Florida Panthers and Charlotte Bobcats hope never catch on in America, they essentially mean that the worst teams in each country’s top professional tier are moved down to a lower league (in France, it’s the bottom three of the twenty-team Ligue 1). And a similar number of the top teams from the next-best tier are promoted to the next highest league.
Of course, the fact that Paris Saint-Germain—the French capital’s only major football side, a former champion of Europe that’s never been relegated in its thirty-eight-year history—was in nineteenth place in the league standings (“dans le rouge,� they say) with eight games to play wasn’t the only element lending significance to Wednesday’s game. There were also these three matters:
1. Strasbourg was also in the “relegation zone,� so to speak, just three points ahead of Paris. With a win, Paris would not only improve its lot but gain ground on one of the teams it needed to pass to avoid relegation. And in twenty-five visits to the Parc des Princes, Strasbourg had never beaten the local side.
2. Paris won the Coupe de la Ligue this past Saturday, in a memorable match at the Stade de France, the largest stadium in the country and site of the country’s victory over Brazil in the 1998 World Cup Final. Bernard Mendy converted a penalty in the ninety-third minute to secure the win over Lens—an extra-league bright mark amid an otherwise trying PSG season. The game versus Strasbourg represented the local fans’ first chance to applaud their Coupe-winning heroes at home.
3. The predominant topic of sporting conversation in France this week, more-discussed even than the result of the cup final, was “l’affaire du banderole,â€? as it has been commonly referred. During Saturday’s final, a Paris supporter group, reportedly KOP Boulogne, unfurled a banner reading “Pédophiles, chômeurs, consanguins : bienvenue chez les Ch’tis“—basically proclaiming France’s northern population, the Ch’tis, pedophiles, unemployed, and inbred.
This led to gallons of ink spilled by sportswriters denouncing the act, meetings between elected officials from Lens (a city of 250,000 in the north of France) and the Sarkozy government, and calls from the mayor of Lens to have the final replayed. And thus Wednesday’s match emerged as a test for PSG fans, with increased police presence and security at the match and a nervous energy that was, thankfully, unleashed in an appropriate and positive manner.
After a few drinks in the 16e arrondissement, where the hulking concrete stadium is located, the official Sportstrotter-brother-in-law-to-be and I headed to the stands an hour early, probably the earliest I’ve ever showed up at a pro sporting event (back when I attended every Blue Jays game, they called me “sixth-inning Braithwaite�), just to soak up the atmosphere.
A few noteworthy differences between the crowd in Paris and a typical North American stadium:
1. The spectators are almost all male. That a sporting event could be seen as a fun night out for the family hasn’t caught on in Paris, obviously. In my section I counted one woman, who happened to be sitting right beside me, with her large boyfriend on the other side. And this girl chain-smoked and screamed at the refs with the best of them throughout the contest.
2. Yes, everyone smokes at the game. This must have something to do with the fact they don’t sell beer inside the stadium. Also, Parisians love to smoke, and they’re not allowed to smoke in bars or restaurants as of January of this year. But the men don’t merely smoke throughout the game—they smoke hash. Constantly. I had a running tab in my notebook, with columns marked “spliffâ€? and “cigarette,â€? for the bespectacled thirty-something guy sitting in front of me. The final tally? Four spliffs, six cigarettes. Trust me, it’s an accurate count. I could tell the difference.
3. The best thing about a European soccer match: the crowd pumps itself up, leads its own cheers, initiates its own songs. No “Verizon-Coke Clap-O-Meter,� no “Let’s Get Loud!� instructions to the crowd on the Jumbotron. I know it’s not big news to anyone who knows about sports, but it’s true: the best part of European football is the singing.
From the referee’s opening whistle, which followed the traditional lighting of flares in the more hard-core sections of the crowd (I concede that it looks awesome, but man, that has to be dangerous), the Parisians sang. And sang and sang and sang. And not just one or two songs—there were dozens of different cheers, and an equal range of source melodies, from “Yellow Submarine� to “Old MacDonald Had A Farm.� Sure, most songs boiled down to some combination of the words “aller� and “Paris� (at one point, as if mocking their own lyrical repetitiveness, the crowd broke into an English chant of “Let’s go! Let’s go!�). My personal favourite, the song that literally gave me goose bumps up in Section G of the northeast corner of the stadium, was “Cette Chanson Capitale,� which steals the tune from my favourite Edith Piaf song, “Milord.�
(Yes, I have a favourite Edith Piaf song. You have a problem with that? Look, I worked in an Alsatian patisserie in Toronto for a couple years, and so I’ve heard every one of her songs a million zillion times. Seriously, go give the old gal a spin—I guarantee you won’t be able to listen to “Milord� without humming the melody for the following twenty minutes.)
We were having such a good time, singing and shouting and swearing in French at the Strasbourgeois (for the fourth-graders out there who keep asking when I’m going to teach you some awesome French curse words: enculé), there was also one heck of a match taking place. While the Parisians had a Pauleta goal called back in the first half on a phantom offside call, RCS had some great chances of their own. Fortunately for the home side, much-maligned French international keeper Mickaël Landreau came up with some amazing saves. Things looked to be approaching a stalemate in the second half, when two substitutes teamed up for Paris to produce the only goal of the match: Bernard Mendy, the hero of the cup final four days previous, broke down the right side, in the corner where we were sitting, and laid a perfect pass back to Ivoirian striker Amara Diané who set the crowd off on one of the most wild celebrations I’ve ever encountered in a sports stadium—like three grand slams rolled into one.
At times the whole production seemed a bit much, celebration-wise, for a late-season win, the team’s first in nine league games, against a lowly visitor. Normally moving from nineteenth to seventeenth in a twenty-team league, when you’re playing in the country’s biggest market, isn’t something that one should get overly excited about. But there we were, with ten minutes left, the entire crowd turning our back to the field, locking arms around shoulders and jumping up and down while the Parisians took time off the clock and defended their lead. I’m not exactly sure what this gesture intended—were we showing that we were so confident of the result that we didn’t need to watch? Waving our arses at the losers?—but I can tell you one thing: it was fun. And a win’s a win, right.
Always.
Sky Goodden: This is startling, refreshing, overdue, and damn good. Thank you, Shary.
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