For the love of the game #7: Standard Liege
It's the first leg of our 4-game ground-hopping football journey and we've decided to start at 'The Hell of Sclessin!"
Prologue
Liege, Belgium. Night.
Georges Simenon, the writer, crosses the eternal bridge and examines the wreckage. The industrial buildings lay in ruins for as far as the eye can see. A red-brick chimney stack, which once looked upon Liege proudly, has crumbled, breaking down of its own accord like a decaying tooth. The concrete flyovers have been indecently sliced through and the rusted steel rebars jut out and twist grotesquely downward like hardened rusty veins.
This place. This inferno.
He loved it when he was a child. He loved it when the Germans marched into town in 1914. There were no rules back then. His father cheated. His mother cheated. Everyone cheated. Back then, Georges stole everything he could lay his little thieving hands on. It was in his blood after all.
This bridge. This devil’s backbone.
Georges looks down at the lusty swarm of Liege hell-raisers jumping off public transport, pissing in the street, climbing the icy grass bank and hurdling the low barrier onto the footpath. In swathes they pass quietly on either side of him. Walking shadows. He turns and follows. On the north side of the river, the stadium glows like a child’s night-light. Once more into the fire. Once more into the Hell of Sclessin.
It’s been a long first day of the trip. We have been travelling for seven hours when we arrive by car in Liege.
Our hotel is in the centre of town, sandwiched between a McDonalds and a KFC, adjacent to the Opera House. We park in the underground car park, two levels down.
Within twenty minutes of checking in, we are heading back out into the city on foot. It’s dark. It’s cold. It’s busy.
The shops are closing up for the day and the bus queues are getting longer. Our bus stop is only a short walk from the hotel and we wait for about ten minutes before our single decker arrives. Alongside a dozen or so Standard Liege fans, wearing red, we hop on.
Snaking alongside the river, our bus takes us down cobbled streets and past the railway station. The station is magnificent with it’s herring boned structure as we pass underneath it.
Our stop is in Haut-Pré which is just across the river from the football stadium. We step cautiously off and follow the crowd.
Men are taking a piss under the bridge in the squelchy shadows as the ice thaws beneath their freezing feet. Pissing wherever you want to seems common place here.
On the other side of the busy street, fans are climbing up a muddy grass bank to get to the bridge. We guess it must be a long way to walk around, so we follow them up the embankment. At the top of the greasy slope is a low metal railing and we scramble over it onto the bridge itself.
Beneath us the inky-black Meuse river flows angrily. On its rippling surface, the reflection of the bright white stadium lights shimmer like kitchen foil.
There is a subdued, almost eerie whisper as we cross the Meuse and descend gradually into Sclessin.
Tonight there is quite the police presence. Genk are in town and they are flying high at the top of the league. They have sold out their allocation and I wonder if there will be some trouble.
We follow the path around the stadium and realise quite quickly that we will have to walk almost all the way around it to get to our entrance. The club shop taunts us from inside the metal fence. We will come back at the end of the game for our hats and for our scarves.
Both of us are gasping for a beer so we queue up at one of the crowded outside bars. When we reach the front, the barman bluntly refuses to serve me until I remove my red and white ‘LOSC’ hat, which I have totally forgotten that I am wearing. Unfortunately, even when I remove my hat, he still won’t serve me. This bar - it turns out - only takes pre-paid beer tokens.
We bustle our way through the crowd and enter, via a turnstile, into a little fanzone where there are a couple of food and drink vans.
We fill up on chips and lager before climbing the steepest staircase of any ground that I have ever visited. When we get to the summit, we are rewarded with an excellent view.
Before kick-off the home end erupts into a colourful cacophony of flares, firecrackers and fireworks. The smoke engulfs us as the KRC Genk fans and the Liege pyromaniacs at our end set off their flares too.
It’s a good crowd (19,619) and this is the ideal fixture to get our weekend off to an exciting start.
The game flies past. It’s a pretty even match and there are plenty of chances at both ends. The 17-year-old Konstantinos Karetsas, playing in the number 10 role for Genk, catches my eye as a player to watch out for. He’s technically gifted and intelligent. I wouldn’t be surprised to see him in the Premier League sooner rather than later.
We head off a few minutes before the final whistle with Genk 2-0 up. After the match we visit the club store and I have a piss in the outside urinals which is a unique experience. Darren takes photos, which I find a little odd, and then we catch the last few minutes on a TV in a nearby bar.
The journey home is eventful because we have decided we can walk back to town. It’s 6km in a straight line - but even so it’s only a decision that two drunk blokes can make.
Things take a turn for the worse when we realise that Belgium has gone and stuck a bloody great big hill in our way. Even so, we make a good fist of the climb despite the lack of Sherpas to guide us up the ‘mountain.’
Finally, exhausted and regretting our hasty decision to walk, we arrive back in Liege. The party-goers are just heading out wearing their glad-rags and the town looks primed for a night of hedonistic debauchery. We continue on our way. Neither of us are in the mood to party tonight.
Epilogue
Georges follows the two English idiots up the hill and away from the stadium. He imagines the Jules Maigret novel that he would never get to write.
Maigret arrives at the square on top of the hill at sun-up. His pipe is clamped against his bottom jaw as he exhales great clouds of smoke into the blood-orange dawn sky. He is a Chiaroscuro image, a silhouette on a photographer’s negative.
As a younger detective, Maigret had worked in Paris. He had loved it there. The cases he had worked. From the opulence of the Avenue des Champs-Élysées to the Bohemian streets of Montmartre, Maigret had seen it all. To be back here, in Liege, was just about right. He felt at home.
First Maigret examines the body of the man in the red hat. He is plump, about 5’ 7’’ and wearing jeans. On his feet he has blue plimsoles with three white diagonal stripes stitched onto the canvas uppers. His lips are blue. His throat is slashed.
Maigret removes the hat from the dead man’s head. “This man is French,” he pronounces confidently holding aloft the hat with LOSC written on the side in white letters. “This man is from Lille!”
The other dead-man is half-hidden behind a refuse bin. One leg is broken, twisted behind his lower back and blood has dried on the cobbles close to where the remains of his skull now rests.
Georges Simenon sighs. He expects that he will imagine the full novel tonight. He even thinks of a title, The Hell of Sclessin.
As he watches both men stumble into the lobby of the Hotel Ibis he smiles inwardly, those two English idiots really should have caught the bus.
Georges Joseph Christian Simenon (13 February 1903 – 4 September 1989) Belgian writer, most famous for his fictional detective Jules Maigret.
<div class="getty embed image" style="background-color:#fff;display:inline-block;font-family:Roboto,sans-serif;color:#a7a7a7;font-size:11px;width:100%;max-width:594px;"><div style="padding:0;margin:0;text-align:left;"><a href="http://www.gettyimages.com/detail/2199123214" target="_blank" style="color:#a7a7a7;text-decoration:none;font-weight:normal !important;border:none;display:inline-block;">Embed from Getty Images</a></div><div style="overflow:hidden;position:relative;height:0;padding:71.04377% 0 0 0;width:100%;"><iframe src="//embed.gettyimages.com/embed/2199123214?et=AqulZdEWS39Z4DRMgakBFQ&tld=com&sig=CGSq0m5loioG38qHpyTX889UMxmoWINkPX6-Yq4ZGms=&caption=true&ver=1" scrolling="no" frameborder="0" width="594" height="422" style="display:inline-block;position:absolute;top:0;left:0;width:100%;height:100%;margin:0;"></iframe></div></div>