England vs France: French coming with a message of resistance

Football appeared frivolous set against the atrocities on Friday night but Wembley’s friendly should be seen as an emphatic and immediate response to the terror

Paul Pogba is at the forefront of a multi-cultural France side emulating the class of ’98 (AFP)

In a parallel universe late on Friday night, Roy Hodgson was struggling to be heard above the deafening euphoria of the young people, drawn out to enjoy themselves by the same unseasonable November warmth that had helped populate the streets of Paris, 1,000 miles to the north.

There was a crescendo when the Spain team appeared a few yards away, boarding their bus out of the stadium at Alicante, on the Costa Blanca, and the England manager’s staff fumbled around, trying and failing to shut the windows of the little side room where he spoke.

So he carried on regardless, the screams outside providing what – in retrospect – was a desperately ironic counterpoint to the terrors unravelling on Boulevard Voltaire and Rue de Charonne. Never did a football manager’s briefing, which wrapped up with Hodgson extemporising on whether Chris Smalling’s cramp and Jamie Vardy’s fluid on the knee would render them unfit to play France at Wembley on Tuesday, seem so utterly pointless.

The enormity of events was only beginning to dawn as Hodgson spoke, because the inconsequential details of football have a way of obscuring the bigger picture. Some of us, absorbed by Spain versus England which had just ended, were slower than others to appreciate the game’s irrelevance to the broader scheme of things. So we carried on much like before, communicating Hodgson’s football information by Twitter. “Michael Carrick has severely twisted ankle. Doesn’t know if ligament damage.”

Those who transmitted this were soon drowning in a foul river of abuse, propagated by those who have come to enjoy that medium as their own channel of hate.

The picture of Paris became clear soon enough. Barely a word was exchanged when the England players reached their Asia Gardens hotel, up the coast in Benidorm, an hour later. Sky News was on in the dining room where the atmosphere was sombre during the light post-match meal before the players dispersed quickly and quietly to their rooms.

That the French team managed to train, as they did at Clairefontaine yesterday, defied belief, given their proximity to the horror. Patrice Evra was in possession of the football in the Stade de France on Friday evening, when the sound of an explosion was heard, early into the friendly against Germany. The footage shows his reflex reaction.

It was when he landed at Luton yesterday that Martin Glenn, the FA’s chief executive, called Noel Le Graet, the France Football Federation’s president, to explore how the French felt about Tuesday’s match at Wembley. The message was: “Let us know in your own time what you want to do.” England has, in a far less desperate circumstance, been here themselves. The friendly against Holland at Wembley in 2011 was called off after consultation with the Metropolitan Police, in the aftermath of the riots that August.

The events of Friday are too fresh to consider the question of whether France is an appropriate place to stage a European Championship next summer. When the time is right, there are challenges to discuss. From a British police perspective, they include securing the resources required to handle the creeping return of English hooliganism, which poses a risk at the first international tournament easily accessible from these shores for years.

That trend was visible on the streets of Alicante in the early hours yesterday when young Englishmen taunted and fought each other in the streets. At least 20 were involved. The French forces will be vastly preoccupied, without having intoxicated Englishmen to cope with.

Beyond such desperate calculations, though, there is the question of whether football can play a part in stitching together the fabric of a France which finds itself so torn today. And there is evidence to say that the answer is “Yes”. It is to be found back in the mists of time – 1998, when France last staged an international tournament.

There were some desperate days as that World Cup approached. Jean Marie Le Pen’s National Front had secured sweeping electoral advances. Then Aimé Jacquet’s multi-ethnic squad – the so-called Black, Blanc, Beur (Black, White, Arab) – gradually showed another way. There was Lilian Thuram, born in Guadeloupe and a strong voice for the minorities; Patrick Vieira born in Senegal; Marcel Desailly, a son of Ghana; Zinedine Zidane, born in Marseilles and of proud Arab extraction.

Those boys were the embodiment of a new French identity. It was one imbued with a sense of universality “that chimed with the most exalted ideas of the Republic’s founding fathers,” as Phillippe Auclair puts it in Lonely at the Top, his brilliant biography of Thierry Henry, whose own ethnicity added to the whole intoxicating notion when Didier Deschamps lifted the trophy.

At the South Africa tournament, 12 years on, that unit fell apart, riven by factionalism. But the Deschamps squad which arrives on these shores tomorrow reflects a multi-cultural France as much as ever. More of the second and third generation immigrants – Hatem Ben Arfa, Moussa Sissoko Paul Pogba were born in France, with Evra an exception, but the spirit of what Auclair called: “The miracle of 12 July” – the day they lifted the greatest prize – remains indelible.

Le Graet and the French Federation will be hosted in the Royal Box at Wembley on Tuesday. The Wembley Arch was turned red white and blue overnight on Friday and it may well be the same on Tuesday. Hodgson, a man of wisdom and fine values, will have something to say, too. It is hard to conceive of a more emphatic message of resistance to those who perpetuated Friday’s terrors than the stadium’s response to the anthems and then to the visiting side.

On nights like Friday, football seems like a frivolous irrelevance, but this will be a week when it shows it can play its part.