The Europa League anthem. Those opening bars the strings, the rising melody, the sense of occasion filled the tunnel, and for a moment, the noise from the crowd dimmed, as if even the Virage Sud felt the weight of the ritual. I closed my eyes.
I thought about the Railway Arms. The mud. The cold. The sheer, ridiculous impossibility of the journey from a Sunday league pitch in Moss Side to this tunnel, in this stadium, on this night. The anthem swelled, and I opened my eyes, and the two lines of players began to move.
We stepped out into the Vélodrome, and the wall of sound hit us like a physical assault. Sixty-seven thousand voices, unified into a single, deafening, terrifying roar. The stadium was a bowl of white concrete and blue and white flags, the floodlights so bright they turned the pitch into a luminous green rectangle that seemed to float above the noise.
