Kick-off was set for 8:45pm. It happened around 8:50pm. Five minutes, at the King Baudouin Stadium, over a matter of socks: the French players’ socks wouldn’t stay up and were causing discomfort.
According to TF1, relayed by RMC, a staff member had to go back and fetch better-fitting socks from the stock. Meanwhile, the Red Devils waited in the concourse of the stadium for the Blues to arrive.
Louise, our intern, read the Walfoot report three times. She opened a new tab in her notebook. The tab is called “stock room”.
Silly question, but does that mean there’s a room somewhere under a stadium with spare socks for a national team, and a person whose actual job is to run there. I looked for the name of the position. I checked, and actually nobody knows. I’m told the pre-match protocol is timed to the second: the children, the walk-out, the anthems. Fine. But nobody planned for the sock minute? Basketball doesn’t have that, I looked: you play in short socks, they don’t fall, there’s nowhere for them to fall to.
She also flagged another fact from the file, noted in the margin with an arrow: during an earlier match in Turkey, Zinedine Zidane once turned up late and missed the start of La Marseillaise. Louise thinks there’s a thread here. She doesn’t yet know which one.
The Belgian players, for their part, waited in the concourse. Louise would like to know what you do for five minutes in a corridor, kitted out, ready to play, in front of a door that won’t open. Whether they talked. About what. Whether anyone checked their own socks, just in case.
Me, in a corridor, I’d have given a team talk. Five minutes is a long time, you know.
Louise asked the newsroom whether the staff member had run or walked to the stock room. Nobody saw. Anyway, she still has a lot to learn.
It’s true, we checked: Walfoot.
