This wasn’t how this was supposed to play out for les bleus, as the French team is known.

As noted in a couple of posts (below), I went out to Stade de France tonight, just north of Paris, to see France in its Group 7 qualifier against Romania.

France has been struggling to score, but Romania was basically out of contention and playing without its best player,  striker Adrian Mutu of Fiorentino. This was the match where France was going to get well, at home, then go to Serbia on Wednesday with a chance to take the lead in the group …

And, well … it didn’t quite work out as planned.

France got a goal from veteran Thierry Henry, 32, in the 48th minute, and that seemed to quell the disquiet among the fans at the loud and crowded stadium.

But eight minutes later, disastre!

Little Romanian midfielder Iulian Apostol, the best player on the pitch for the visitors, curled a pass deep into the box from the right flank. The ball was behind France central defender Julien Escude, who feared that a Romanian had snuck in behind him … so Escude stretched and stuck out his foot, maximum extension, and got just enough of the ball … to redirect it into the France net.

Own goal. 1-1.

The French panic was on. The ball had hardly come out of the netting before France coach Raymond Domenech had Franck Ribery yanking off his warmup jersey and headed onto the field. Ribery hadn’t started, and it wasn’t quite clear why the dynamic little man wasn’t in there, given France’s struggles to score, of late. (Domenech started Andre-Pierre Gignac at center forward, instead, and Gignac was awful.)

Once the game was tied, the French came forward at every opportunity, but they seemed to lose their cohesion, or their nerve, and the efforts were increasingly futile.

Meanwhile, Romania decided it was interested in the game and would even play hard in it. The Romanians had two good scoring chances in the late going, and France had what appeared to be an Henry goal called back by an offsides call.

Fans began trickling out of the stadium even before it was over, and they flooded the gates as soon as it was over. The French team left the field quickly, before they could get booed or whistled at … while Romania ran away as if it had just won.

The upshot of this result? France can’t catch or pass Serbia on Wednesday.  And the way the French looked tonight — alternately young and mistake-prone and old and tired — it’s hard to imagine them going into Belgrade and coming out with three points. Or even one.

(Another upshot? France might even fire Domenech, if they didn’t have another match in four days. Domenech is about as popular in France as the grippe.)

France was thinking in terms of winning the group, but now second place is far more realistic, with the hope that it can win a home-and-home playoff with some other second-place team out of Europe — and gain one of the final four Euro berths in South Africa.

It was a fun atmosphere, though. I’ve been in the Stade de France several times.  Most of them when it was new, back during the 1998 World Cup. I saw Denmark rout Nigeria there in the round of 16, and France outlast Italy in PKs in the quarters, and France edge Croatia in the semis and then France smoke Brazil, 3-0, in the championship. The result that set off a spontaneous three-day French holiday and there were people partying in the streets for two days.

I was back in the stadium in 2003 for the Confederations Cup semis, when France beat Turkey 3-2 (a fun match) and saw France defeat Cameroon 1-0 for the championship.

The stadium isn’t quite as shiny and impressive, now, as it was 11 years ago. But it’s still a fine stadium, inside, with great sight lines. And it’s well-served by mass transit, both by the metro (subway, which is how I got there) and the RER, more of a rail line that serves Paris, too.

Anyway, it seems likely that the not-so-new stadium will get an extra game in it, in November, when France plays some other second-place team for the right to go to South Africa next June.  As noted, not how France thought it would work out.