French fans will hold off celebrating for a few days yet, writes Ruadhán Mac Cormaicin Paris
THEIR TEAM may have lost, but that didn’t keep thousands of fans dressed in green and white from spilling on to the Champs-Élysées in Paris on Saturday night, singing and cheering in defiant celebration of their side having lived to fight another day.
The final whistle had barely gone in Croke Park when waiters in tuxes were stopping to peer out at an endless cavalcade of boisterous fans sweeping up the street. Green and white flags rose from the crowd and the clatter of car horns took hold of the night. It’s not over yet, they proclaimed.
There may have been some French and Irish supporters in the area as well, but on Saturday night the streets belonged to thousands of young Algerians celebrating – if that’s the word – their team’s 2-0 loss to Egypt earlier in the evening. The result means the two sides will meet again on Wednesday in a play-off for a place at the World Cup finals, and with Algeria having failed to qualify for more than 20 years, that’s worth marking.
Expectations run higher for the French team, and a narrow win in the first leg of a play-off their supporters felt they should not have found themselves playing never promised to bring the masses onto the streets. Some sports fans here even mock the idea of watching a match en groupein a bar as an Anglo-Irish affectation, and it takes a lot (a 3-0 win over Brazil in a World Cup final, say) to make Paris feel truly taken over by a match.
At a small busy café-restaurant on Boulevard Montmartre, the match kicked off at 9pm on a small screen in the corner with so little attention paid to it, it could have been small-time curling from the snowier provinces of the south. The indifference was palpable. Slowly, of course, people were drawn in. Amid the oak beams, rows of decorative books and red lampshades, the cheers and the groans grew louder as curious passersby stretched their necks around the doorway.
Among them were mother and daughter Mairéad and Oonagh Morgan, visiting from Co Armagh and who had passed an Irish pub down the road. “We came here because we wanted to get away from the match,” said Mairéad.
Further down the street, several hundred French fans (and at least one plain-clothed Irish impostor, identifiable by his furtive applause for every Irish tackle) filled a factory-floor super-pub with more than 25 TVs lining the walls of its three floors.
So loud were the speakers that the chants from Croke Park sounded like they were rumbling in the depths of the building, and not even the most insistent “Allez les Bleus” could drown out the faraway voices from Jones’s Road. Until the 72nd minute, at least.
As the crowd filed out after the whistle, Badis and Chedy, Parisians in their early 20s, looked relieved that the job was all but done. “I think that’s it. It’s 80 per cent finished,” said Badis, before speculating that France would win the home leg by “two or three nil” and then adding politely: “But the Irish played well.”
Five minutes later, the bar had emptied and so had the street outside. The job was half-done, but the cork-popping could wait until Wednesday. At midnight on the Champs-Élysées, the lowest expectations brought glory in defeat. On Boulevard Montmartre, it was just a chilly Saturday night in November.