The attacks in Paris started midway through the first half of the game between France and Germany. It puts football into perspective - it’s just a game, yet it’s so much more than that.

When people lose their lives around a football ground, as they did around the Stade de France on Friday night, how can you think about football? When the events were taking place, every game going on around Europe at the same time was dampened. Football is irrelevant at times like that. But it’s in the direct aftermath of an attack like this that football becomes very relevant.

When Roy Hodgson's England host France tomorrow night, England fans will stand together with their French brothers and sisters in defiance and solidarity. It will be a stunning display of Fraternité as English fans unfurl the French Tricolore and sing La Marseillaise.

After all, what we like to call our national sport is really a global sport. No matter who you support, the act of supporting already gives you something in common with a fellow supporter. Football has so much to offer anyone who finds themselves in grief because football has so much to offer anyone in any aspect of life - it brings people together more than it drives people apart.

Every week, football grounds are turned into modern temples, places of passionate outpourings of emotion, adoration and desire situated in and around our cities, lit up like beacons of hope. Watching your team play is the one time in your week when you can get caught up so thoroughly in emotion, you forget about the petty stresses of life just as easily as you forget about its sincere horrors.

What’s more, international football has become one of the last bastions of acceptable nationalism. One where, instead of being xenophobic or dangerous, nationalistic passion is left on the pitch. A display of nationalism purely within the confines of the 90 minute dance. Nations hold their collective breath. They chant together, they celebrate together, they get nervous together, they get outraged and angry together. But that’s it. When it’s over, it’s over.

Other than an emotionally traumatic event like this weekend’s atrocities in Paris, only football can create that level of raw outpouring of emotion and solidarity. During the fevered atmosphere of the Arab Spring, banners displaying the crests of the Ultras of the local clubs were seen. World Cups bring the kind of interest that nothing else can bring, even in the corners of the world where the darkest expressions of our humanity is found.

Football isn’t a Western thing, it’s a world thing. The raw human emotion that it creates makes the perfect expression of our humanity, wherever we come from. When protesters in Egypt fought for freedom from an oppressive government, bringing along a football banner was such a natural thing to do. It’s an obvious example of liberty, and one we take for granted in Europe.

So tomorrow night, when France come to Wembley, football will again show its power, and it will remind us that the things we take for granted are some of the most powerful things we have.

The drive to get England fans to sing the Marseillaise before the match is just a stunning gesture of emotional support for another country in the midst of a profound and horrific mourning. For 80,000 men and women, English, French and a whole host of others, of all colours and creeds, races and religions to stand up and sing the national anthem of the away team in solidarity is something that only sport can offer. It’s huge, it’s emotional, and if there’s a dry eye in the stadium and the extended television audience I’ll be surprised.

Everyone who stands up to belt out that most emotional of songs will do so equally. They’ll do it whether they speak French or not. No one will judge accents or pronunciation, it doesn’t matter how badly you sing or how badly you pronounce the lyrics because everyone is equal on the terraces, all driving towards the same goal. Football has the power to make you hug a complete stranger in the emotion of scoring a goal. Surely there can be no more powerful expression of humanity than during a football match.

Tomorrow night’s game is the ultimate act of defiance to an attack on humanity, an attack on football, because football’s values are humanities values in microcosm.

When English fans stand with French fans tomorrow night they won’t be standing up for nationalism, just for football. Football is the purest form of Liberté, Egalité and Fraternité. And on Tuesday night it will add one more to that list: Solidarité.

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