The Mailbox features a couple of first-hand accounts from the Champions League final. Some, though, haven’t much sympathy for Liverpool fans or the English.
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One night in Paris
I felt compelled to write this entry about my experience on Saturday night in Paris – to me it is important that the honest accounts of individuals experiences on that awful day are at least attempted to be captured.
I’m not going to write about the match itself – the game felt like an irrelevance after what I experienced and the atmosphere amongst the fans reflected that. Of course I wanted my team to win but when I joined in the chants, it was more from a position of defiance than excited passion – UEFA and the local authorities had done a job on us.
The fact that we didn’t score meant that at no point in that evening in Paris did we get to experience one moment of joy. Part of me thinks it’s appropriate that we didn’t lift the cup as that would have only served to gloss over the awful events that book-ended the match.
I travelled with 4 other people who had legitimate tickets purchased from the club. We aimed to get to the ground at least 2 hours before kick-off and chose to do so by cab. This meant that we avoided the mass bottle neck on the route out of the train station on the west side of the ground, however, we did got a ring side seat for it as we were stuck in a jam for a fair amount of time alongside. Not a good start.
Got out of the cab at 7.40 local time and decided to head around up to the entrance point at the north west of the stadium. As we did so we could see various locals trying to climb through the bushes to scale the side wall that would have got them into the outer perimeter section. It was getting worse. There was an under-current feeling of disarray and I started to feel uneasy.
What then followed was 45 minutes of my life that will stay with me for a long, long time… and that was just to get…
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