Green passion reasserting itself at St Etienne

LOCKER ROOM:Could Liverpool really go down? Who knows, but it's wonderfully compulsive to watch, isn't it?

It’s been an odd and confusing week. Lately, though, everything is odd and confusing. How hard was it for us benighted and impoverished Micks to watch the scenes from Chile and not wish for a small hole to appear in the dark ceiling above us. Didn’t you feel the guilty yearning for some benign power to break through into our dreary little world to start rescuing us one by one? We’d appear back on the surface of the earth singing Danny Boy and Ireland’s Reverse Charge Call so as to reassure everyone that we are harmless and wouldn’t ever get uppity again if the world would just give us our money back.

Everybody loves a harmless Paddy begorrah. People would cheer and shed tears as they watched us shake our shillelaghs at the ghoulish ponces from Standard and Poor’s and Moody’s, those ratings agencies who couldn’t understand that the sub-prime mortgage disaster was hurtling down the global track, but who now preside over the wreckage and control our fate like X Factor judges.

Hard it was to accept that there was nobody drilling above us. And then before the miners and in the breaks from the miners and after the miners had gone home we watched Liverpool Football Club. This great salty city of industry and hustle once genuinely expressed itself through its emblematic football clubs.

Today Liverpool FC merely offers further evidence that football fans just don’t get it. They don’t understand the first thing about how the world works. The rich businessmen came in and borrowed till they were up to their nipples in money and then decided they’d had enough. And Liverpool fans who put so much into making Liverpool FC the sporting and cultural phenomenon it is got all replica shirty and demanded that the bandits make good that which they had sullied and pillaged.

No! No! No! What did they think was going to happen? They’d all get to take Fernando Torres home on different nights and feed him scouse? Wake up la. Could the people of Liverpool not all take a pay cut and submit themselves a stern finger wagging from the suits? That’s how we do it. After all everybody enjoyed winning. Well didn’t they? And feeding that addiction made the suits run the place into the ground out of sheer goodwill.

So who is really guilty? Why all this unpleasantness? Why not face up to a generation or two of enviously gazing up a division at Tranmere Rovers? Give up your tithe. Turn your anger on your selves. There’s good chaps. Say 10 mea culpas now and just run along.

Could Liverpool really go down? Who knows but it’s wonderfully compulsive to watch, isn’t it? Such a frisson of excitement early last week when there was talk that they might be docked nine points. Nothing against Liverpool but it’s just always slightly thrilling when bad things happen to big clubs.

And if they were to go down, well, the world will keep turning. The millionaires will vanish to whatever club de jour is paying the most money and perhaps the people of Liverpool will come to feel differently about their own club.

Perhaps they will enjoy the feeling that it is their club again and not a corporation.

It’s funny but for a lot of Irish males it is possible to tell their age as accurately as carbon dating just by asking which English soccer club they support. I know that Liverpool supporters in their middle years are usually two to three seasons younger than myself. I imagine that whereas the FA Cup final of 1970 through to the European Cup final defeat of 1975 were speckled with occasions which caused people to fall in love with Leeds, the subsequent years belonged to Liverpool.

None more so than that night in March 1977 when St Etienne came to Anfield with a 1-0 lead to protect and ended up losing 3-1. So many young fellas fell in love with the reds that night. I fell for Les Verts. Allez Les Verts.

Rocheteau! Janvion! Curkovic! Bathenay! Sarramagna! Platini! The names from the golden era have a shimmer and a glamour which is unique, especially so when set against the hardness of the little town they played for. St Etienne made its crust from armaments when Europe needed such things but its staple was coal mining and the team’s wonderful square shouldered stadium was a working man’s escape at weekends and on European nights.

That night in Anfield finished them sadly. The previous year they had been mugged (like Leeds the year before) by the defiantly unromantic Bayern Munich team of that era. In the spring of 1977, though, St Etienne were at their peak and their poetry was due to be rewarded at last with a European Cup. Kevin Keegan scored early at Anfield that night and although St Etienne got the next goal the momentum and passion in those pre-prawn sandwich days was always with Liverpool.

Hard times followed. In one of those indulgences which this job permits this column got to go to St Etienne half a dozen times during the 1998 World Cup. You could sit in a little Irish bar at the back of Le Gare Chateaucreux and exchange laments with almost anybody about a team which was propping up the second division, watched by less than 7,000 a week and seemingly destined for semi-professional status.

They thought that was bad but worse was to come. The passport scandal which rocked the club at the start of the last decade marked the beginning of an era of unprecedented dominance for the neighbours.

Olympique Lyon are half an hours train ride away and were always the dilettantes from a town more interested in food and wine. Then they won their first league title and ended up winning seven on the trot easily eclipsing St Etienne’s proud four-in-a-row at the end of the 60s.

With the resilience that has marked the town’s industry and football however they preserved. Yesterday St Etienne were (unsuccessfully) seeking their third away win on the trot, a modest enough ambition but one which they haven’t fulfilled in 20 years.

They failed but remain in second place, their new star winger Dimitri Payet doing wonderfully, after his first two influential appearances in a French jersey recently. Payet stretched his run to eight goals in nine league starts. On the inside holding midfielder Blaise Matuidi has been called back into Laurent Blanc’s first team. And in defence by common consent the world’s sexiest sporting man (sorry Berno, just the messenger) Carlos Bocanegra.

An affection for St Etienne and the enjoyment of trailing after their adventures by running a finger down the odd La Ligue table is one thing but it is difficult to imagine the genuine passion once more reasserting itself in St Etienne. Real people with real lives and real jobs and a football club that is lifting them through to the light.

Maybe Liverpool will go down. Leeds did. United did. Chelsea did. City did. And if they do fall they will be more like the beloved club which Shankly found and rebuilt than at any time in their recent history.

You don’t have to stand on a millionaire shoulders to get a look at the sun. Millionaires aren’t like that. But your own people pulling you back toward the light. That’s the romance.