At home with the boys in green

He was trim and dapper in a way that only French men can be. His new business was a week old and it was thriving. Alerted by his customer's clunking grammar and the vocabulary borrowed from a reticent French parrot, Monsieur Dapper leaned across the counter and flipped LockerRoom's accreditation around the right way looking for an explanation. Some people have a way with language. LockerRoom not have way.

"Ah. Ze Ireesh Times. Bienvenue Monsieur!"

And he beamed a high-wattage smile and swept his hand backwards through the air, the ellipse describing the ample expanse of his premises.

"Welcome home Monsieur Ireesh Times!"

"Ah beacoup gracias," said LockerRoom with versatility and vigour.

We were standing either side of a handsome mahogany counter in the bar which is tucked away in the corner of le Gare Chateaucreux in St Etienne. On the wall were pictures of the Dublin football team of the 1970s and sepia shots of Dan Breen throwing the ball in during an All-Ireland final of the 1920s.

Behind the bar was the trim Frenchman, proprietor of the newest Irish bar in France and a barmaid from Mayo whose head was "wrecked with serving coffee all day every day."

Out of consideration, LockerRoom ordered a Perrier ("Avec gas," he added, importantly) and continued to exchange merry beams with the bar owner.

"Irlande!" he said happily again.

"Oui," beamed LockerRoom smoothly, stressing the point by giving a thumbs up sign. "Allez Les Verts! Allez Les Verts!"

Sometimes even the dumbest hay seed hits paydirt. Allez Les Verts: The first three words of French ever to lodge in this vacant head (what year did Lady Marmalade first get released anyway?) and still the most evocative. To be standing in a bar in St Etienne and to have dredged up the magic phrase after all these years. LockerRoom was surprised to be asked to pay for his Perrier after that.

"Vous souvenez vous de la grande epoque?" said the proprietor, his eyes twinkling and the corners of his mouth pegging themselves up high.

"Oui, oui, oui," nodded LockerRoom soldering the words together fluently. "Rocheteau! Janvion! Curkovic! Bathenay! Sarramagna!"

And then there was a pause as LockerRoom adopted the pose of Rodin's Thinker and tried to summon up the names of the two brothers who used to play up front for St Etienne in the mid-1970s when Les Verts were taking glamour and reinventing it.

Ah! St Etienne were the heart-breakers of European football in the 1970s. If you had two Subbuteo teams to supplement the standard, dowdy Manchester United and Everton teams that came with the set, you had Brazil and you had St Etienne, and you took care not to kneel on your St Etienne players.

They taught us everything we knew about soccer glamour. They dripped with the stuff. And Dominique Rocheteau was the King Midas of the team. Everything he touched turned to glamour.

Rocheteau was on television here in France the other day, still handsome, but with short hair now and giving no hint that he was once the most thrilling enigma in soccer, his long hair trailing down the back of his vivid green jersey as he skimmed like a green hovercraft over the turf. When the short interview with him finished there was such a residual of glamour in the hotel room that the place upgraded itself from two star to five star.

Rocheteau was the king, but the team were all monarchs. In the great years they played with the sort of noble adventure which hadn't been seen since Dumas invented his three musketeers.

Rocheteau played up front in a 4-3-3 formation and later, when Michel Platini arrived, he dropped back to play wide in a fourman midfield, Platini supplying him with the ammunition.

It was a time of light and dark. Bayern Munich were the most hated team in Europe, overwhelmingly dark, tactically brilliant and the proof that LockerRoom has no powers when it comes to putting curses on people.

Traumatically Bayern outwitted Leeds in the 1975 European Cup final in Paris, sitting back and absorbing all the pressure in the world before hitting two horrible breakaway goals which can have given them no satisfaction. Between times, Peter Lorimer had a sublimely beautiful score disallowed for the most dubious offside decision since Leeds had lost the league to Jeff Astle's dodgy goal a few years earlier.

The following May, though, it seemed that St Etienne were about to right all the wrongs of the world. Germany would apologise for its Bayern Munich and the glorious maquis would triumph. They swept through the early rounds, inflicting heart-warming home and away victories on Glasgow Rangers in the process. They got to the final in Glasgow and Bayern pulled the same stunt again.

Roth scored a second-half goal which was as sinister as a single gunshot on a night of fireworks and, bafflingly, Rocheteau was left on the bench until the match was all but over.

They were still spinning a year later. Having won their third French championship on the trot, St Etienne went at it again but this time, (curses!) Liverpool got in the way at the quarter-final stages. Has any team so loved by the football public failed so poignantly?

All these years later it is a gesture of pure sentiment for Platini to have brought the World Cup here and a little irony of the draw that Curkovic, the goalkeeper for so many years, was goalkeeping coach to the Yugoslav team who opened the World Cup action in St Etienne last weekend.

There was no reason other than sentiment for the competition to come here to this hard-pinched industrial town whose team has fallen on such hard times that it almost got relegated to the amateur regional leagues in the season before last.

In the past St Etienne had the mines and the armaments industry to feed it and its luminous football team to romance it. So passionate was the affair that the stadium was known as Le Chaudron Vert. The Green Cauldron.

Today the green cauldron sits like a palace in a ransacked city. Its stirringly square-shouldered stands, reshaped and refitted for this World Cup, rise above a tatty industrial estate on the outskirts of the town. This World Cup will be the first time the old ground has breathed easily in many years. Last year, as St Etienne struggled to 17th place in the French second division, the average attendance was just over 7,000.

So strange then to be here in St Etienne calling down the magical names with a man LockerRoom has never met before. St Etienne is not the place we imagined it to be. Its grey drear makes the miracle of the great team seem all the more remarkable.

But what an apposite piece of scheduling to bring the World Cup here, a nod to the spirit of the event. Four years ago the World Cup was played out in splendid stadiums which had no soccer history and discarded the legacy easily. The Atlanta Olympics were scarcely over when the stadium which witnessed Michael Johnson's heroics was gutted and refitted for baseball (and the neighbouring baseball ground which saw Hank Aaron break Babe Ruth's home run record was razed).

St Etienne isn't pretty, but for the greatest football competition in the world to come here is a remembrance of time past, a homage to the spirit of the game. It fills the soul with the innocent air of boyhood to travel to this place of heroes.

Platini got it just right. LockerRoom will wager heavily that he won't be the only one trawling the internet next winter for news of St Etienne as the team and its new coach fend off oblivion once more.

Allez Les Verts!