PARIS (AP) — When Arsenal faces Paris Saint-Germain in Saturday’s Champions League final, the rivalry will extend to the singing in the stands. Thousands of opposing fans will try drowning out their rivals’ anthem with their own at Budapest’s Puskás Aréna stadium.Those from defending champion PSG will passionately bellow “Tous ensemble on chantera” (All together we will sing) invented by the club’s Ultras fans. Arsenal fans will sing the catchy chorus taken from “The Angel (North London Forever)” written by singer and Arsenal fan Louis Dunford in 2022. It’s a homage to the Islington area of north London where he grew up, close to Arsenal’s current and past stadiums: Highbury and The Emirates. It was soon adopted by sections of the Arsenal crowd and then kept growing in popularity.“This song I wrote in my bedroom as a little love letter to my home town,” Dunford told spectators during a concert. “I never dreamed I’d hear it sung at every home game.”
With some London rhyming slang — known as Cockney — and gritty-but-witty vocabulary, it tells of local pubs, faces old and new, rough council estates with roguish characters, single mothers, and people in trouble with the law.
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