LockerRoom: October gets a hard time, I think. A bad rap. A bum deal. October is always more fun than you expect it to be.
The championship has ended and you think for a while that you might as well hibernate until the National League play-off stages but then along comes October all spicy with county finals and made surprisingly interesting by the flavour of the Premiership just getting serious. Quite often on top of all that there's big dollops of international football to enjoy.
Since we had the revolutionary idea of diminishing the ozone layer October no longer means chilblains and balaclavas. It's futbol, futbol, futbol. It was in October that Don Givens scored three against the Ruskies, thus initiating a spiral of Soviet self-doubt which would culminated in the collapse of the Iron Curtain. Twelve months later, another October (October is nothing if not reliable), and Don scored four against the Turks, depriving them of the confidence to join the EU for decades to come.
It was in October that we suffered our heaviest competitive defeat (7-1 off in Prague in 1961. Heineken still available at that time), and it was in another October that we conceded the most goals at home in a competitive game (five against France in 1953). And so on. October is such an interesting month I'm thinking of transferring my birthday to it. I'll be 28 on the 19th of this month.
Paris this week. Paris in October. Unless the EU expands to the point where we get to play a competitive game against Brazil in the Maracana I don't think there can be a more glamourous fixture. Not Italy. Not Germany. Not Holland. Not Spain. Even before they began winning World Cups France were sexier than sex itself. If you grew up in the 1970s (which, remarkably for one of my youth, I did) you associated all that was lovely and sinful with France.
I was a passionate devotee of St Etienne. St Etienne and the Osmonds. My first three words of French (in a vocabulary which after years of education would ultimately extend into the low double figures) were Allez les Verts. Those words were of little use in chatting up French students or in the boulangerie but they said a lot about you, marked you out as a man of distinction, one of the northside's foremost (four most?) polyglots. You must remember that team. Jean-Michel Larque, Dominique Bathenay, the brothers Herve and Patrick Revelli, the Argentine Oswaldo Piazza, the Dutch chap Johnny Rep. There was Janvion, Curkovic, Sarramagna and for too short a time Platini. Crowning it all was Dominique Rocheteau, who had longer, blacker hair than any footballer before or since. He had the good sense not to spoil the look with big sideburns and he had hips that swivelled better than those of Elvis Presley.
In a time of darkness and oppression, St Etienne and Rocheteau were a beacon of hope. At the time Beckenbauer's Bayern Munich side were the scourge of all right-thinking people. They'd thieved the European Cup of the Leeds "Total Football" United side of 1975 and the following year the oppressed and downtrodden of the earth looked to St Etienne to put matters right in the final.
The game was played in Glasgow. For some reason Rocheteau spent what seemed like the entire game warming up behind one of the goals, his dark mane heaving into view every now and then. St Etienne lost by a goal (Roth) and in retrospect might have regretted the tactic of keeping their greatest striker on the wrong side of the goalposts for most of the match.
St Etienne never fully recovered. They won another league title that year, their third on the trot, but lost in the European quarter-finals to Liverpool the following spring after two epic and lovely games.
Their last league title came in 1981 and since then they have struggled, just getting back to the first division this season after a scandal-plagued, three-year sojourn in the lower depths.
Perhaps the greatest moment in their recent history came in 1998 when this column covered all but one of the World Cup games played in the Stade Geoffroy Guichard in St Etienne. Despite the air of celebration (actually I believe they were en fête) which permeated that time, I had mixed feelings about half a dozen climbs up the epic stairways of the old stadium and wished in my shallow way that I'd fallen in love as a teenager with a French club who would embrace escalators.
St Etienne in 1998 was, apart from the football-related novelty, quite the opposite in terms of glamour and grandeur to Paris. A hard, pinched, working-class town. I spent a couple of days there wandering around looking for a replica green jersey but such frivolous fashion items were unheard of.
There was a bar newly opened at the little railway station with a woman from Mayo working there and grumbling about having to serve nothing but coffee. And that was it really. The only way to get to St Etienne on train was via Lyons, which looked down on St Etienne as fervently as St Etienne looked down on Lyons (Lyon and St Etienne were playing yesterday in one of soccer's most passionate derbies).
The St Etienne influence still pervaded French soccer the last time we played World Cup footie in Paris. It was October (of course it was - did you think those first couple of paragraphs were just leading nowhere?) 24 years ago and we got done 2-0.
In those days we were always getting done. We were the world's leading exponents of victim soccer. That night France scored two and Ireland had one disallowed. Kevin Moran (who I still believed at the time was being held against his will by soccer fundamentalists) headed a good ball down to Michael Robinson (who was making his debut in what would be our first serious abuse of the spirit of the parentage rule). Robinson scored. The ref wrongly gave handball against Moran. That and some fine keeping by the amusingly named Dominique Dropsey (his middle name was actually "Oooops") cost us dearly.
It was a great game though. The French had Platini and Rocheteau and the mercurial Didier Six playing for them. Tigana and Battiston and Lacombe too. Great side but matched by our own. Chris Hughton was wonderful. Brady, Heighway, Stapleton, Lawrenson, Moran and Mick Martin all played. We had a lot of class on the pitch.
A year later, another October (there's one every year, I tell you), we beat the French at home. Ronnie Whelan had been added to the mix by then and Dave O'Leary came in at the back with Lawro moving to midfield. It was an epic performance, our 3-2 win sparked by an early French own goal. It was too late, however. We'd been done again in Brussels some six months earlier when a perfectly good Frank Stapleton goal was disallowed and a ludicrous free three minutes from time gave the Belgians a single-goal win.
We lost out that time by a point to the Belgians and on goal difference to the French. The Dutch, finalists in the previous World Cup, were squeezed into fourth spot.
A little Irish luck back then would have altered World Cup history. There would have been no France versus West Germany semi-final in Seville at the following year's World Cup, no Harald Schumacher assault on Patrick Battiston, no two-goal lead in extra time squandered by the French, no German win on penalties (Didier Six, I remember, thundered his peno straight at Schumacher - little wonder the Frenchman was known for his Gallic grumpiness at virtually all of the 14 clubs he played for).
All these years on, another October arrives pregnant with promise. We're no longer victims and next weekend all the pressure is on the French. Revenge is a plat best served froid, I always say.
