The air in Marseille tastes different. It is thick with salt from the Mediterranean, with the sweet rot of fish from the Vieux-Port, with the exhaust fumes of a city that has never learned how to slow down. But on matchday, all of that disappears.
On matchday, the air tastes of smoke. Of gunpowder from the flares. Of the acrid, chemical burn of blue and white pyro that drifts in clouds across the Boulevard Michelet, stinging your eyes and coating the back of your throat.
And underneath it all, something older and harder to name the collective body heat of sixty-seven thousand people who have been drinking pastis since noon and have come to the Stade Vélodrome to watch their team tear the visitors apart.
