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Why St Etienne are green with envy
If you don’t mind the sight of St Etienne glued near the bottom of the Ligue 1 table, you did not grow up in France in the 1970s.
Everybody there then had two teams, their own and Les Verts (The Greens). Even today, many fans of other sides have a soft spot for the team from a small industrial town near Lyon.
Why? Simply because France, where football is not part of the popular culture, fell in love with the beautiful game courtesy of St Etienne’s European Cup saga in 1976.
An unglamorous outfit featuring players who had worked in the city’s factories, they went all the way to the final, losing to Bayern Munich in Glasgow. And many people will tell you they only lost because Hampden Park was the only place in the world at that time, apart from maybe some pitch in Kazakhstan, to still have square, wooden posts instead of round, metal ones.
