Aidan Curran posted on September 28, 2008 19:00
Your Paris correspondent went to the Parc des Princes for the first time on Saturday night. It was to attend our first ever French league game – Paris Saint Germain against Grenoble. We went with a group of grenoblois living in Paris and who had bought tickets not through the club but online.
Almost inevitably, the tickets weren’t for the away end of the stadium but the Boulogne end, home of the PSG ultras and one of the most notorious terraces in European football. So there we were, right behind the Paris Brigade – a group of young men with the pinched, rat-like faces of right-wing youth. (The real hardcore fans, the infamous Boulogne Boys, were to the left of us on the other side of a fence I loved like no other fence before.)
Fortunately, our Grenoble group weren’t wearing their gang colours. Besides, what away fans would be dumb or mad enough to go up the Boulogne end of the Parc des Princes? The subversive element was innocuous and went unnoticed.
Now that the World-Cup-winning 4-5-1 formation fad is dying out, French league football has improved a lot this season. Saturday’s match was relatively open and flowing. Grenoble had seemed happy to hang on for the away point, but after an hour they twigged that PSG weren’t much of a threat and started coming forward. Still, a scoreless draw looked probable.
Then with 13 minutes to go, Grenoble’s Nassim Akrour chanced a shot from just outside the PSG box. The ball floated gloriously over PSG keeper Mickael Landreau and landed softly against the back of the net like a baby being laid down in its cot to sleep. It was Grenoble’s only shot on target all night, and it proved to be the winner.
Deep in the heart of PSG territory, our group of Grenoble fans started celebrating.
Fortunately again, the Paris Brigade had been concentrating on stiff-arm salutes and drill-sergeant chanting when the goal was scored, so they were taken by surprise. Either that or they really didn’t give a damn about who was up the stand behind them.
Anyway, your Paris correspondent spent his Saturday night as an away fan taking the home end of PSG’s ground. Who’ve have figured this hooligan streak in us? Next visit to Dublin, we’ll be hanging around Doyle’s Corner looking for Bohs fans.
Aside from our wanton acts of football aggression, we had an ear out for what music would be played in the stadium. Five minutes before the teams emerged, the PA was playing ‘Champagne Supernova’ by Oasis – a fitting band for the tedious and anticlimactic PSG. There was no music for when the teams came out, not even the French version of ‘The A-Team’. And for the song that’s played whenever PSG scored… well, we believe it’s on a wax cylinder in someone’s attic.
For their chants, the PSG fans took terrace favourite ‘Go West’ and made it “Paris, Paris Saint Germain”. They also sang their version of ‘One Man Went To Mow A Meadow’. But the most surreal moment was when they broke into a chant to the air of… ‘Flower of Scotland’.
Almost as strange was the drummer accompanying the Paris Brigade, who would occasionally strike up the rhythm of ‘Bolero’. Paris, where even the football ultras are cultured.
So, to celebrate our little victory over the forces of darkness, here's Sergiu Celibidache conducting the Munich Philharmonic Orchestra in a stirring version of 'Bolero':
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