Valencia v Getafe, Wed 16th April, 10pm

I much prefer watching cup football to league games. I suppose that supporting a team that is never going to win the league tends to affect you in that way, although for clarity I should really point out that the Boro don’t win too many cups either. And when I talk about liking cup football I mean the games where when you lose that’s it, you are out. Not the first leg games where everything is cagey and teams are happy just to be in contention when the final whistle blows. And I certainly don’t mean those group stage games that some cup competitions have where not only do you not need to win, but sometimes losing doesn’t matter either. Those matches are worse than testimonials featuring soap stars and celebrity chefs.

No, the games that I like are the ones where at the final whistle one set of players slumps to the floor knowing that it’s all over for another year. That despite sticking their clueless centre half up front in desperation for the last few minutes and after having a player sent off near the end for the petulant sort of behaviour that you rarely see outside of nursery school, it’s finished, their chance gone until next season. Another year closer to the end of their career and another dream of a winner’s medal dashed.

And the best of all cup football is the final. I know that quite often it’s a terrible match and that sometimes the less confident of the two teams will try and stifle the game, maybe even play for penalties right from the start. But that’s only because there is so much at stake. Two teams left, one of them collects the trophy, sprays the champagne, does that belly flop dive and parades their children whilst the other team drifts away as quickly as their fans, wishing that they had been knocked out at the first opportunity rather than having got so close and failed.

I first saw the Boro win a cup in 1975. Or rather I didn’t. I was at the first leg of the Anglo Scottish Cup final against those well known Highlanders, Fulham, but despite our 1-0 win we went home at the end with the anti-climax of knowing that there was still a second leg to come. We were stood along the side of the pitch in the Clive Road Terrace and whilst I remember very little about the actual match, the sight of my next door neighbour applying his cigarette lighter to a Fulham banner that hung down from the seats above us sticks vividly in my mind over thirty years on. I took success for granted in those days, Charlton’s Champions were doing well in the First Division after winning the Second Division by a record margin the previous year and to a naïve ten year old the Anglo Scottish Cup seemed like the natural next step en-route to becoming Real Madrid. Not that I’d even heard of Real Madrid in those days. Fulham, which I had been told was a little bit north of Aberdeen, had just become the most exotic team in my world. And we had beaten them, set fire to their banner and then sent them homeward tae think again.

Maybe I wasn’t so naïve in those days after all, Nottingham Forest won the same trophy the following season and I’ve since read that their manager Brian Clough maintained that it was success in that final that encouraged his team to believe in themselves, to see themselves as winners. One year on, they won the Second Division title, although not as convincingly as we did. The following season they won the First Division championship, then the European Cup, then another one, all on the back of that Anglo Scottish Cup victory. We didn’t kick on quite as enthusiastically as Forest did and a few years later found ourselves back in the Second Division with just the invitational Kirrin Cup to our name. The Kirrin cup, for the odd one of you who doesn’t know, was a pre-season four team tournament in Japan from which the Boro returned home with a terracotta trophy similar to the sort of thing that a garden centre might sell you to stand by your back door and grow geraniums in. It is similar in prestige to the old Fairs Cup, although more highly prized by gardeners with an appropriately sized gap on their patio.

We’ve only picked up one more trophy in the years since then and my memories of cup finals tend to be of the losing kind. From the Zenith Data Systems final at Wembley to the UEFA Cup in Eindhoven via two league cup finals and an FA Cup, I’ve seen us fall just short too many times. In fact, I’m struggling to see exactly why I should prefer cups. But like the gambler who has to put another coin in the slot or the fisherman who keeps casting as darkness falls, there is always the chance that it will be better the next time. And so with all that in mind, I thought that it would be quite good to watch the Spanish Cup Final.

I’d missed the final of the Kings Cup (as it is known) when I was living in Spain, mainly because it is held midweek and the company that I was working for a few hundred miles away preferred me to go into the office now and then. They were funny like that. Mind you, it did give me time to write these match reports up. This time though I was on holiday and so I could go. I was spending a week by the seaside north of Barcelona and I’d already been to see Espanyol play Osasuna in the league at the Olympic stadium a few days earlier. This one took a bit more planning though. One of the differences between English and Spanish football is that they don’t have a National Stadium. I think that this is a great idea where the national team is concerned, it allows the whole country to get a chance to see them locally, but it doesn’t half mess with your plans if you want to go to the Cup Final but don’t know where it will take place.

The venue for the final had been announced a few weeks before the semi-finals and would take place at Real Madrid’s ground. That was excellent news, it had a 75,000 capacity and with Real Madrid already out of the competition there was a reasonable chance that I might be able to pick up a ticket. I booked flights from Barcelona to Madrid and a hotel ten minutes walk from the Bernabeu stadium.

Barcelona were playing Valencia in the first semi final with Getafe drawn against Racing Santander in the other. I was hoping for a Barcelona v Racing Santander final, Barcelona because I wanted to watch Messi and Racing Santander because they weren’t Getafe. I’ve nothing against Getafe apart from their location. As a Madrid club I thought that, despite very small gates for league matches, they might make getting a ticket that little bit more difficult.

And in the way that these things rarely go to plan, Valencia beat Barcelona and Getafe knocked out Racing Santander. So, that meant definitely no Messi and possibly no tickets.

Once the results of the semis became known, the Spanish authorities decided to make it just that little bit more difficult for me by changing the venue for the final to Athletico Madrid’s smaller Vicente Calderon stadium instead. The Valencia fans quickly booked up all the hotels near the ground and all I had to show for my early booking close to the Bernabeu was the prospect of a long walk home after the match. I suppose I should be grateful that they didn’t switch it to half way up a volcano in the Canary Islands.







Tom and I arrived in Madrid just after lunch on match day and took a taxi to our hotel. It was as quiet as you would expect a hotel in the wrong part of town to be. Still, that has its advantages sometimes and we wandered off towards the Santiago Bernabeu to do the stadium tour. I’d seen a few matches there during my time in Spain, including Zidanes last home game, but thought it might be interesting to have a look behind the scenes too. Tom had done Middlesbrough’s Riverside Stadium tour when he was a kid and somehow, to the glee of his school friends, he had managed to walk face first into the glass doors of the Willie Maddren centre. His highlight, if not that of his mates who were still doubled up at his rapidly bruising features, was seeing Juninho’s flip flops in the shower area. It’s getting desperate when the star attraction is a damp pair of size four beach accessories; although Tom did come home and tell me that we had some sort of silver spade or shovel in our trophy room, perhaps won by the groundsman for his exquisitely turfed goalmouths. Real Madrid obviously had a lot to live up to.

The tour was great, plenty of history and old memorabilia including things like Di Stefano’s shirts and medals. We went high up into the stands and then walked around the edge of the pitch. Tom bent down and brushed the grass with the tips of his fingers. “Ah,ah,ah,ah,ah” shouted a security guard, much as a mother seal might if she suspects you are about to club her offspring with a six iron. We apologised and were allowed to continue to the dugouts and sit in those big seats that footballers now have instead of ‘the bench’. I looked for the one specially made for Big Ronnie’s arse, but didn’t see it. Perhaps they removed it when he left to make a bit more room for Raul’s throne. How long before they have settees and beds in there, I wonder.

The trophy room, as you probably guessed, was fantastic, although without the Anglo Scottish Cup and Kirrin plant pot it didn’t seem complete. Sad case that I am, I couldn’t help but notice that in the past six seasons they had won precisely one trophy, the league title in 2006-7, which was exactly the number of cups that we had won in the same period. They did look likely to overtake us by winning the league that season mind and if the vigilant security men could continue to keep us peasants from interfering with the grass then they might just add a silver spade to their recent haul as well.

We went into the tunnel, affecting limps and wincing in the way that substituted players do and onwards in to the Press Room where we sat behind the desk that you see on the telly whenever they want to announce how much they admire a particular player and then tell you that whilst the last thing that they would want to do is unsettle the bloke, they would love to sign him if only his current club were interested in selling.

And then, as all good tours do, we finished off in the club shop were we marvelled at Real Madrid bingo sets, tape measures and Zinidine Zidane action figures that appeared flexible enough to pose dispensing a kick in the chops or a head butt to the chest. It was a great museum and tour, far better than the Dali ones that we had done earlier in the week and as neither of us had walked straight into any glass doors much more enjoyable than Tom’s previous Riverside experience.

With the culture done, it was time for the match, or at least the pre-match meal. We got the tube to Sol and went for something to eat in the Plaza Major, a big square full of restaurants, pigeons and blokes making animals out of balloons. There were quite a few Getafe fans too, blowing horns, banging drums and waving flags. Last time I’d been in this square I’d mixed up my cod with my codillo and ended up with a pig’s foot for lunch. This time we picked a place where the menu came complete with photos of the dish, removing that element of suspense as the waitress approaches with your plate.

At 6pm we set off for the stadium, after all we only had four hours to go until the 10pm kick-off. I’d had a look at a map and all we had to do was walk along Calle de Toledo for a couple of miles and it would bring us out at the stadium. Not quite Wembley Way, but a bit more interesting. One shop sold nothing but tins of tuna, whilst another specialised in loose hand fried crisps, piled up high against the window. We passed a bar where everyone was drinking cups of chocolate, thick enough to stand a spoon in. All the time the numbers of Getafe and Valencia fans making their way to the stadium were increasing. Few of them were drinking in the way that we tend to do on these occasions. What they were doing though was setting off fireworks. Bangers were the most common, but much louder than the ones that we had when I was a kid. Every now and then I’d fail to notice someone casually lob one in my direction and then I’d leap in the air as it went off a few feet behind me. Sometimes someone would set off a few of them linked together, like Christmas lights from a house in need of a re-wire and a twenty bang epic would blast out like machine gun fire before leaving the street thick with the sight and smell of smoke.

When we got to the stadium we walked three quarters of the way around, the Getafe fans congregating mainly at one side, the Valencia fans at the other. There were twenty two thousand fans from each club, with supposedly around ten thousand tickets going to sponsors and neutrals. I didn’t see many neutrals though with almost everybody wearing the blue of Getafe or the orange of Valencia. I didn’t see anyone selling tickets either, which was a bit disappointing, after all I hadn’t travelled all that way just to have my nerves shattered by firecrackers or to press my nose up against the window of the loose crisp shop. Just as we were beginning to think that we might have to watch it on the telly a bloke with long hair and a Lee Van Cleef moustache approached us and after a bit of negotiation we paid seventy five euros each for tickets with a face value of forty five euros. I was quite pleased with that, thirty euros didn’t seem too bad a mark up on what, at forty five euros, I reckoned to be a cheap ticket for a cup final. The only downside was that they looked as if they were in the Getafe end. I was expecting Valencia to win, they were the cup specialists with this being their ninth final in the last nine years and I’d been hoping to join in the celebrations for a change rather than have to get my white hanky out again. But at least we were in, or we would be after a pre-match beer or two outside a bar around the corner.

Two beers turned into three and then four before we got into the ground with about fifteen minutes to spare. We were just in time to see some skydivers land in the centre circle but mercifully too late to witness the Spanish Eurovision entry do their stuff. Sometimes that final beer really is worth having. We were behind the goal, a few rows from the back of the stand and, as expected, in the mass of blue that made up the Getafe end of the stadium.

The game kicked off at seven minutes past ten, probably the latest that I’ve ever seen a game start. If it went to extra time and penalties, it could be nearly one in the morning before one of the teams would lift the cup. A couple of small children in front of us had already fallen asleep, following in the tradition of adult Boro fans who after a whole days drinking in Eindhoven snored their way through the UEFA Cup Final.

Both sets of fans started well, twirling scarves, coats and banners above their heads, whilst trying to out sing each other. On every seat there was a blue Getafe flag for us to wave. I was a little cautious, I remembered Tom nearly having some blokes eye out with a flag as we celebrated promotion against Oxford ten years earlier. In fact his sister almost did the same at the Carling Cup Final. Perhaps I carry the Cyclops gene. Everything was going great in those first couple of minutes, the fans were enthusiastic, the team had started well and no one had been blinded. Then Mata scored for Valencia. It felt like Di Matteo hoofing one over Ben Roberts and his Alice band in the FA Cup Final all over again. After ten minutes Alexis doubled the lead for Valencia and we sat down for a while, the cup final seemingly decided before the skydivers had even packed their parachutes away. Valencia sat back after that and Getafe saw a bit more of the ball, creating a few chances which they didn’t take. After about half an hour the first white handkerchiefs appeared, interspersed amongst the twirling scarves and being waved by the more pessimistic of the Getafe fans.

Right on half time Getafe got a penalty, awarded on the linesman’s advice after what looked to me like an outrageous dive. The Valencia players weren’t happy and there was lots of jostling of the diver, the other Getafe players, the officials and even amongst themselves. We hadn’t even reached half time and already there had been seven yellow cards handed out. Granero scored from the spot, Tom and I E-I-Oed to the bemusement of the people around us and after looking out of it Getafe were back in the game.

At half time, there was no beer for sale, or at least no alcoholic beer. However its absence hadn’t had much effect on the queues for the toilets. It seemed that for every person that came out another ten were going in. I was expecting them to be like the Tardis when I finally got inside. I just made it back to my seat in time for the second half, whilst the less well endowed blokes who preferred to queue for the privacy of a cubicle were probably still there when the floodlights got switched off a couple of hours later.

Getafe never really looked like equalising and with six minutes remaining Morientes, who had replaced Villa as the lone striker for Valencia with a quarter of an hour to go, headed in the rebound from a free kick to make it 3-1. “They always let you down son” I remarked to Tom in the way that Boro fans are brought up to say at cup finals. He knew the feeling; he had been to them all except the winning one at Cardiff. Bloody Jonah.

Getafe switched from 4-4-2 to 3-4-3 and then after Celistini received a classic cup final red card finished the game with an unorthodox 3-3-3 formation. Celistini hadn’t been on the pitch for very long when the combination of imminent defeat, the victors showboating, the crowd chanting “Ole” at every successful Valencia pass and the close proximity of an ankle wearing an opposition sock proved too much for him and he lashed out, then ran off down the tunnel.

The Valencia fans were already celebrating with flares and firecrackers and as the clock ticked around to midnight, Getafe’s hopes were fading faster than Cinderella’s chances of a leg over. At the final whistle about half the Getafe fans remained to see the King present his cup to Valencia. They knew the procedure having lost in the previous years final to Seville. We hung about for a while, despite the rain, before heading off for our carefully chosen hotel miles away.

And here are some photos

Espanyol v Osasuna, Sunday 13th April 2008, 5pm

After a couple of Bulgarian games the previous month, it was back to Spain for my first Spanish game in over a year. I was staying at L’Escala in the Costa Brava and conveniently for me Girona were playing at home that weekend in a Spanish third division game just half an hours drive away. Not so conveniently I’d mistakenly believed it to be a 5pm kick off and when the game started at noon I was still sat outside of a bar rather than behind the goal.

So that meant Plan B, which was L’Escala themselves. I’d driven past their ground the day before and with one small new stand and fencing on the other three sides it looked quite smart for a team in the Catalunya Preferente, which is probably about the equivalent of the Langbaurgh Sunday League. The bad news was that they were playing away and I couldn’t match the name of the team they were playing with any of the places on my map. I hate it when that happens, there could be a game going on two miles up the road but I can’t tell from the fixture list because clubs think it’s clever to give themselves a name that doesn’t appear on a map. I’d penalise them all five points at the start of each season if they wouldn’t change their name to include their town or at the very least amend it to include a postcode or even a grid reference. So we would have, for example, North London Arsenal or Raith KY1 1SA Rovers. I appreciate it might not always make for a catchy chant although if you were really stuck you could fall back on the old…

“Give us a K, Give us a Y, Give us a 1, Give us another 1, Give us an S, Give us an A, What have you got?”

No more driving around Fife looking for signposts pointing to Raith when you should be in Kirkcaldy, that’s what matey.

So, if there was nothing doing in the third division and the games in the fifth division were better hidden than the last bottle of cider at a teenage party I’d have to have a look at the big games in La Liga. Barcelona was only about an hour and a half’s drive away so that was an option. Mind you, as options go it wasn’t the best as they were playing a few hundred miles away at Reactivo. Luckily my geographical knowledge of the bigger teams was good enough for me to know that Espanyol played in Barcelona as well, perhaps exempting them from my five point penalty plan. Fortunately Espanyol were at home to Osasuna the following day and so that’s were we would go.

The Espanyol game didn’t kick off until 5pm but I had my parents with me and as they fancied a trip into Barcelona to visit the Picasso museum we set off early in the morning. Actually I suspect my Dad would have been happier coming to the match with my son Tom and I, but that’s married life for you. I think that he was starting to tire of museums, we had been to a couple of Dali ones the day before and like me he hadn’t been too impressed. In two whole galleries I only saw one decent painting, which was of Mrs Dali’s back. Maybe Salvador wasn’t too confident doing faces. If I’m truthful, which I try to be unless I think that I might end up with a good kicking or a Fixed Penalty Notice, most of stuff looked like it should have been stuck on a fridge door rather than a gallery wall. This was a shame really because I got the impression that Mr. Dali was probably quite a good painter when he could be bothered to put the effort in. I reckon that once he got well known he cottoned on to the idea that he could earn as much knocking out half a dozen wacky images in the same time as it would take him to paint something decent. I suppose I should have cut my losses after the first museum but I’d read that Dali’s tomb was in the second one and I persisted in the hope that in keeping with the rest of the surrealist surroundings he might have decided in death to have his moustache waxed, his body varnished and then to spend eternity with a unicorns horn or a Buick exhaust pipe stuck up his arse. But he hadn’t, or at least if he had, it was well hidden behind a brick wall.

The drive through the countryside to Barcelona was interesting, well more interesting than the museums were anyway. Every few hundred yards there would be a woman stood by the side of the road, sometimes in a very short skirt, sometimes in thigh length boots, sometimes both. They were usually accompanied by a chair and an umbrella. At first I wondered if they were accessories for some sort of kinky inclement weather lion tamer scenario.

This occupied my mind for a good few miles as I considered, probably for the first time, why circuses considered it prudent for lion tamers to go into the cage with wild animals armed only with a chair and a whip? I’d have preferred a gun myself, although I appreciate that in the event of Simba turning nasty, popping a cap in his jungle king ass might not go down well with the parents of small children on a birthday treat. I suspect, however, that the girls waiting by the side of the road were not kitted out with chairs and umbrellas in anticipation of a Billy Smart fetishist, but more because I imagine that those boots take a terrible toll on the bunions and due to it looking like it was going to rain.

I did think that a couple of dozen prostitutes dotted about in the middle of nowhere on a Sunday morning seemed a bit unusual, but judging by the occasional deserted chair and temporarily abandoned brolly, there must have been some business going on in the bushes beside the road.

My Mam, bless her, was a little bit more naïve than us blokes,

“Are they selling something?” she enquired to initial silence.

“Umbrellas I think, Nanna,” my son replied, trying not to catch my eye.

“They don’t seem to have many left” she pondered as we passed one who looked old enough to have actually posed for Dali. I doubt she did though, I didn’t remember her from the previous day’s paintings and I’m sure a picture of a girl with just the two eyes would have stood out from the rest.

Later that day we dropped my Mam and Dad off at the Picasso museum and set off for the match. I’d not seen Espanyol before and for me the attraction was not so much them but their ground, the Olympic stadium. It had been built for the 1992 Olympics and then taken over afterwards by Espanyol in a similar scam to the way in which Man City got a nice shiney new ground after the 2002 Commonwealth Games.

There were other parallels with Man City too, Espanyol are the second team in the countries second city and are overshadowed by glamorous neighbours. I don’t know if their fans take delight in being crap in quite the same way that ‘Citeh’ fans do, but in my ignorance I’ll imagine that they do. It’s easier to make assumptions than to find stuff out. A bit like my assumption that Manchester is England’s second city. I’ve no idea about that either, but it helps with the comparison.

My guidebook recommended that we got a shuttle bus to the ground from the nearest metro station, but as usual we ignored it. It was only an inch or so on the map and coloured in green, so with almost an hour to go to kick off I thought a stroll though a park would be a good idea.

Three quarters of an hour later we agreed that I’ve had better ideas. It was through a park all right, but all uphill and at what seemed like a forty five degree incline. Going up Great Gable with a backpack seemed less of slog than the walk to this ground. As we got closer to kick off but seemingly no nearer the stadium I sympathised with the runners who a few years previously must have had to run up the hill with the Olympic Torch. I doubt that they would have had any trouble with protesters like the current lot. In fact I’m surprised that they didn’t protest themselves. Perhaps they took the shuttle bus. Even worse must have been the marathon runners. If it wasn’t bad enough running the gauntlet of hookers at the roadside in the early stages of the race, they would have had to finish the race with a two mile climb. Although when the working girls were in the bushes they could always have a quick sit down in an empty chair.

We reached the summit with about ten minutes to spare and got our tickets. Prices ranged between forty and sixty euros, which was almost as steep as the walk to the ground. We paid fifty euros each to sit down the side, opposite the main stand and in the sunshine. I thought that I might as well get a bit of a tan for my money. We got to our seats just as the players were coming out and as there was plenty of space we moved along to the half way line and sat up in the back row to get a better idea of the size of the place. It was enormous, a great big bowl with only a small roof covering a few seats down one side, probably just enough to keep the Olympic Committee dry in 1992.

There was a minutes silence for someone before kick-off, or more accurately a minutes worth of the sort of sombre violin music that in years gone by would denote the death of a Soviet dignitary. I hadn’t heard any bad news about Mr Putin or his mates, so suspected that the worthy cause in this case was probably some other poor soul who had decided against catching the shuttle bus.

Espanyols opponents were Osasuna, famous for coming from the worlds best party town Pamplona (five point deduction however for the misleading name) and for signing Boro midfielder Jamie Pollock. Not many English players seem to successfully make the transition to playing in Spain and Jamie, or Jaime as I’m sure he was known, was no exception. A combative midfield player who excelled in shouting at his team mates and pointing at empty spaces on the pitch, he wasn’t really cut out for the technically superior Spanish league. If I remember rightly he came back within a year and ended up, a little heavier than when he left, at Bolton.

I’ve no idea if he did the Bull Run, but I couldn’t recommend a better place for a young English lad to spend a year partying. I’ve been a couple of times for the San Fermin festival and it’s the wildest, most exuberant few days of excess that I’ve experienced since cub camp. I suspect for someone as proficient at shouting and pointing as Jamie, the experience would have been even better.

Espanyol, in blue and white stripes, started well with Coro looking to be a decent player. He went on one run from his own half early on where he went past three of the Osasuna players. It was Osasuna though, in red and black, who took the lead after half an hour despite the scorer Astudillo looking miles offside to me and the rest of the home crowd.

As Espanyol were booed off at half time I looked around the Olympic stadium trying to match my memories of events I’d watched on the telly with the actual surroundings sixteen years later. It was easy enough to picture Linford Christie hammering down the hundred metres track opposite from where we were sat to take his gold. He was one of Tom’s heroes as a small child, known simply as ‘Linford’ in our house and as popular as the Power Rangers and Postman Pat combined. I remember us going to see him run at Gateshead a couple of years later in the days before it all went wrong and he was revealed to have been a drugs cheat.

I recalled Sally Gunnell winning her 400m hurdles final and tried to reconcile the images in my memory with the television footage that I remembered. The stadium looked so much more pristine in my mind. Nowadays the water jump was boarded up, the long jump was fenced off and the track looked really shabby and a lot worse for wear. Although I suspect the same is true of Sally too these days, it was all a long time ago.

I used to work with a girl who had once been brought to Barcelona on a motivational weekend with her office and they had ended up at the Olympic stadium. Apparently they all dressed up in their PE kit and competed against each other pretending to be the likes of Linford and Sally Gunnell. I suspect, however, that the fantasy of being a world class athlete in an Olympic final was spoilt by the sight of some fat knacker from accounts wearing a Man Utd shirt with Hawaiian shorts and grey socks. I’d done a similar thing at the Munich Olympic Stadium a couple of years earlier, re-enacting everything from Gerd Mullers 1974 World Cup winning goal to Mary Peters pentathlon triumph. If it had been raining I’d have had a crack at being Mark Spitz as well. Today though, I settled for watching.

In the second half Espanyol kept pressing for an equaliser and although the stadium only seemed about a third full, the fans got right behind them with chants of “Espanyol, Espanyol…”

They had an effort headed off the line with about fifteen minutes left and then that was about it. At the final whistle we booed and waved our hankies with what was left of the crowd. I never boo at the Boro, not even at the bar when it takes ages to get served, but this was different, I took great delight in jeering the losers off the pitch. That’s one of the benefits of not caring who wins.

Next week it’s the Spanish Cup Final, Valencia v Getafe in Madrid, more museums, less hookers and enough firecrackers to celebrate a revolution.

And here are some more photos...

Akademik Sofia v Velbajd, Sunday 23rd March 2008

The morning after the Montana game I drove back South again. I wanted to be somewhere with a bit more going on than in the countryside villages of the North West, even if all that I had in mind was another Second Division relegation battle. I’d lost faith in the Sat Nav earlier in the trip and not wanting to be taken up mountain passes or through peoples back gardens again I just ignored its instructions and followed the motorway to Sofia. I passed little of note, an impressive mountain range, a few old folk carrying picks and shovels and a couple of graveyards that were built on small hills. The graveyards looked unnecessarily like hard work to me. There was plenty of flat ground around to bury the dead, but it seemed that the place to be laid to rest in rural Bulgaria was halfway up a hill. It looked like a bit of a slog for the mourners and I doubted that the deceased appreciated the view.

I got to Sofia about lunchtime and after giving the Sat Nav one last chance, checked into my hotel. It was pretty posh, well, posher than me anyway, and I had the Penthouse Suite. Disappointingly there was no connection with the magazine of the same name, but reassuringly there was a lift.

The website that I booked it on reckoned that you could see some famous church with golden domes from its window, but I couldn’t. Nor would anyone be able to, I suspected, unless they had a twenty foot long neck. I had a couple of hours to go before Akademik Sofia kicked off against Velbajd on the other side of town, so thought that rather than sitting and waiting on the off chance that my neck might grow, I’d have a wander up the road and have a proper look at the church.

There were lots of old biddies with humpty backs stood outside selling small bunches of flowers and a couple of slightly younger women who appeared to be selling small children. I didn’t want any flowers and I didn’t have the baggage allowance to get involved in the slave trade so I had to politely decline their offers. I noticed that there were no pews inside the church, which was a bit unusual, but I suppose it makes it easier for the vicars to catch the choir boys.

There were a few people lighting candles, I suspect in memory of someone, so I thought that I might as well join in. I’m not religious, more of a pyromaniac if I’m honest. I lit my candle and watched it burn for a while. It wasn’t as exciting as the time I’d set fire to a bog roll in our bathroom as a child, but then again this time I was unlikely to get sent to bed for doing it either. I‘ve always liked setting fire to stuff, I reckon a box of matches is probably one of the best value things you can buy, fifty potential fires on sticks for twenty odd pence. What else can you get for that sort of money that could give you so much entertainment? Apart from perhaps half a pint of petrol.

However, I was in town for the football this time, not to see the place burnt to the ground, so I just watched my candle for a minute or so and tried to look pious. And what then? Do you try and get your monies worth by watching it burn all the way down? I had stuff to do, so I left it flickering away and went back outside into the sunshine.

On the steps of the church, I handed over all of my coins to the old women to ease my guilt at having coins to distribute, but turned down their flowers and children and wandered over the road to a flea market

There was lots of military stuff, mainly Nazi memorabilia, helmets, bayonets, iron crosses, that sort of stuff. If you were planning anything from a beer hall putsch to world domination then this was the place to get kitted out. There were quite a few old pocket watches commemorating the 1936 Berlin Olympics, most of them decorated with a swastika rather than the Olympic rings or an engraving of Jesse Owens though. There was a fair bit of old Soviet stuff too, furry hats, medals, hip flasks with a picture of Joe Stalin on the side and badges from the 1980 Moscow games.

I wondered whether Madonnas ‘Like a Virgin’ LP with a Bulgarian cover would be worth anything, but doubted whether even Guy Richie would be tempted. I then had a flick through a pile of old sepia nudey photos whilst trying to look like a serious collector and not just some one who like looking at pictures of women with no clothes on. I find that it works better at flea markets than it does with the magazines from the top shelf at petrol stations. The thought occurred to me that the women in the photos, who seemed to spend all day lounging not so chastely on a chaise longue were probably of a similar age to the old biddies selling flowers over the road. Possibly even the same ladies I pondered before banishing the thought to the back of my mind.

Three quarters of an hour to go to kick off and I got a taxi. I was a little bit worried that the ground might be twenty miles outside of Sofia and when the driver turned on to the motorway I began to wonder if this would turn out to be the day when I got driven to the woods and murdered. Ten minutes later though we turned a corner and there was the stadium. I don’t know about you, but for me one of the best sights there is in life, is seeing a football ground for the first time, particularly if you have no idea what it looks like and you just turn a corner and its there. This one looked enormous, despite me reading somewhere that it only had a capacity of eighteen thousand. I got out, had a wander around and by walking through an open gate found myself on the terracing behind the goal. The enormous stand that I had pulled up outside of in the taxi was the only stand and would probably account for fifteen thousand of the eighteen thousand capacity. I took a couple of photos and in a rare reluctance to be ‘billy-no-mates’ wandered back out of the empty terrace and back to the main stand to find the ticket office. It was less than 50p to watch Montana the previous day, so even if Akademik were a little bit of a bigger club I couldn’t see it being more than a quid or two and I was happy to pay that to go into the main stand.

However, no ticket was required. Akademic must have decided that for crowds of less than a couple of hundred people it just wasn’t worth the bother and I just followed some people through a tunnel that emerged at the foot of the main stand.

The stadium clock was stuck at five o’clock, broken like the one that we used to have at Ayresome Park. I took a seat high in the stand near the half way line, listened to Bony M on the PA and watched someone get interviewed nearby. It seemed strange that for a game that was free to get into and had only attracted a couple of hundred fans, that anyone was interested in whatever the interviewee had to say. Perhaps they were asking him why the pre-match music was so crap.

The teams came out, Akadmik Sofia in light blue and Velbajd in yellow with red socks. Neither team had a sponsor, although there wasn’t really much of an audience to reach. Akademik were third bottom, with just Montana and Yantra below them. So that meant that I’d seen the three worst teams in Bulgarian professional football all in one weekend. Velbajd were supposedly a class above, in the dizzy heights of mid table mediocrity. The players didn’t shake hands at the start but did that hand slapping thing that the cool people do instead.

Five minutes after kick off the away fans turned up at a corner of the ground with horns, flags (including a union jack), wigs and megaphones. You would think that they were moving house the amount of stuff that they had brought. There were only about twenty of them but they certainly made there presence felt, particularly when they started letting off flares. A couple of coppers were sat nearby but took no notice until a pair of latecomers arrived shirtless and struggling to stand. They were escorted out.

Twenty five minutes into the game Akademik took the lead with a great strike from the edge of the box. The Akademik fans went wild, or at least four of them did. The other hundred and fifty or so seemed pretty much indifferent. The big stand had great acoustics though and the four fans that cared were able to make a fair bit of noise and managed to trade insults with the away fans some one hundred yards away, despite not having a megaphone like their rivals. It was a bit like one of those hostage negotiations. Perhaps the away fans were asking for more flares and flags to be sent over.

Half time saw a bit of an odd sight as the Akademik players waited at the edge of the pitch until all of their opponents were safely in the dressing room before leaving the pitch themselves. It was as if they were frightened that if they didn’t make sure that they were all in the dressing room then they might try to score in their absence.

Not long after the restart Akademik went 2-0 up with after a scrappy goalmouth scramble and the Veljbad fans sulkily started to pack away their banners. They kept up the exchange of views via their megaphones though.

Just as the stadium clock was beginning to show the right time, Akademik got their third goal. It was a bit soft, a weak shot beating the keeper at his near post. Half the Valjbad fans got up and left, still chuntering away I to the megaphone, followed by almost all of the remainder a minute or two later. I suppose that they may have all come in the same minibus. They probably did the right thing as not much else happened in the final twenty minutes. My attention wandered from the pitch to the surrounding areas where you could see a large part of the city from high in that main stand. Not a bad view for free.



And some more photos…

Montana v Yantra, Saturday 22nd March, 3.30pm

I was in Bulgaria a couple of weeks ago so thought I’d take in a couple of football games whilst I was there. My daughter was supposed to have been coming with me, but a fancy dress party taking place on the same weekend put paid to that and I travelled by myself. That was just as well really as I had a bit of work to do measuring up a house and I don’t think that holding the end of a tape measure or sitting through the delights of the Bulgarian second division were exactly what she regards as a holiday. Actually, I think a ‘Jamming your fingers in a door’ themed party would probably have been seen as a better option than accompanying me on this occasion.

I reckon Sophia is a great city. It has just the right mix of foreignness and familiarity to make it interesting but enjoyable. It’s a busy city with plenty of new things for me to stare at but it’s also got some posh hotels where, when I’ve had enough of the new stuff, I can sit down, watch Sky Sports, drink whisky and smoke cigars. I’d visited the previous September and watched the Bulgarian national team beat Luxembourg in Sofia. This time though, I had to be up in the North West corner of the country, close to the Serbian and Romanian borders, so Montana looked to be the best option for somewhere to stay.

I checked for a football team and fortunately they had one. Just. Bulgaria has two divisions, the top division, ‘A’ which has some of the famous teams that we’ve heard of like CSKA Sofia or Litex Lovich, and then ‘B’ which is divided into East and West and didn’t seem to have anyone I’d heard of. Below Division B is amateur stuff. Montana were bottom of Division B and so just scraped in as possibly the worst team in Bulgarian professional football. As I might not get another chance to see them if they got relegated I thought that I’d better go along whilst I could. Fortunately they were at home on the Saturday to Yantra who were second bottom. So that’s possibly the two worst teams in Bulgarian professional football then. Still, I’ve watched Peterhead play Cowdenbeath in the past, although at least with that game there was the prospect of a decent fish supper to follow.

Montana is a couple of hours drive from Sophia, or at least it is if you know the way. I’d got a Sat Nav with the hire car, which whilst it recognised Sophia, had never heard of Montana, a town of 49,000 people, a professional football team and hopefully at least one hotel. Possibly this was because Montana used to be called Mihaylovgrad, but in a marketing wheeze a few years ago they changed the name to make it seem more attractive to visitors. I remember that we did the same thing thirty years or so ago when we changed from Teesside to Cleveland. Perhaps the people of Mihaylovgrad saw the tourism benefits that we got from pinching the name of an American state. Maybe, on reflection neither us nor Montana chose wisely. Why not Hawaii or Florida? Were those names already taken? Or do they have a more expensive licensing fee? Perhaps we missed a further opportunity when we renamed Teesside Airport. Durham Tees Valley is all very well but maybe we should have aimed that little bit higher and picked something really exotic like, say, Bora Bora. It’s one of the worlds most beautiful locations and yet still absolutely perfectly named for singing at the match.

I tricked the Sat Nav by putting in the name of the next city past Montana and it paid me back by directing me through the crawling traffic in the centre of Sophia and by repeatedly instructing me to turn into people’s front gardens. It then kept me away from the motorways and took me up the hairpin bends of a snowy mountain pass.

Some of the villages that I drove through had old people sat outside of their houses, usually with a little table in front of them with half a dozen jars on it. The contents were different colours and looked like jam or honey. It was hard to imagine them making a single sale all day. As I got further north I passed fewer cars and saw more donkeys pulling carts. More often than not the carts were full of straw or sticks. Perhaps the Three Little Pigs were the big employers around there.

One of the other things that I noticed was that just outside most of the villages there would be a gravestone or two by the side of the road. At first I thought that this was just a variation on the practice in the UK of marking the site of someone’s death in a car crash. But it was just too frequent; every village seemed to have a couple of gravestones a few metres away from the village name sign. They seemed very unlikely accident black spots, unless sudden braking to stop and buy honey was responsible. I’m sure I read somewhere that suicides or criminals used to be buried outside village boundaries. Or was it vampires? We weren’t too far from Romania so perhaps that was it. Maybe the old biddies did a sideline in Garlic Sauce.

Death seems to be everywhere in Bulgaria, or rather death notices are. Entire walls are covered with black and white A4 sheets of paper showing a picture of the deceased, their age and (I’m guessing now) cause of death. Huffing and Puffing by Mr Wolf no doubt figured prominently. Every lamp post or telegraph pole seems to have the details of some poor soul who had overdosed on honey or jam. My house in a small village near Montana has the details of an old woman on the front gate, an eighteen year olds death notice on the basement door and a picture of forty year old bloke who had died twenty years ago on a bedroom wall. You’d think The Plague had been in town.

I’d been thinking about death quite a lot that day. When the memorial notices and gravestones are everywhere you can’t get it out of your head and I’d just been told the day before that an old friend of mine had died last Summer. Trevor and I had been good mates twenty years ago in the days when most of our escapades had been alcohol fuelled. We had failed drug tests together in Munich when we had tried to get jobs as grease monkeys at the BMW factory, we’d travelled back from a Boro match at Chester in a black cab because he’d got legless and lost our minibus key, we’d inter-railed through Europe one summer where I remember borrowing his shoes only to be sick on them and then him knocking an Italian lad spark out for no real reason. Possibly envy at his highly polished shoes. For Trevor though the alcohol was a way of life and it did for him in the end. We’d lost touch as we got older, after all there’s only so many times when you can have someone to stay and then wake up to find out that they’ve mistaken your hi-fi for a urinal during the night. But despite barely seeing him for years I thought he’d always be around and it was a shock to hear that he’d gone.

I got to Montana and found the hotel. My guide book insinuated that Montana as a bit of a one horse town and suggested stopping there long enough only to change trains for somewhere better. However, ‘One Horse Town’ wasn’t at all true. There were dozens of horses, tied up on grass verges, pulling carts full of sticks or trotting around the ring road, no doubt delivering honey or gravestones. I found a hotel and then walked the mile or so to the football ground arriving about half an hour before kick off. There were a few men milling about outside as I bought my ticket through a little hole in the wall. It cost one Lev, which is about forty five pence and in the Bulgarian Football/Beer index equates to about half a pint of Bulgaria’s best. The ground looked quite old, possibly because it was. It had a main stand that could probably hold a couple of thousand fans and some smaller terracing around the other sides of the pitch. I took up a position near the half way line, regretting that I hadn’t brought a newspaper to cover the bird crap on my seat like the locals did. The main stand filled up as kick off approached, mainly with older men. There were a few kids and the odd teenage girl, but I didn’t see and grown women. They were probably at home preparing funeral teas.

Just before kick-off a young lad with a black leather jacket and a Ramones haircut walked in front of the where I was sitting and to his embarrassment and to laughter from the rest of the stand a voice from the back shouted out “Hey Ho, Lets Go.” It was the first bit of English that I’d heard in the ground and it was nice to laugh along with the rest of them rather than grin inanely with the usual bemused look on my face. Perhaps Dimitar Ramone had got lost on the way to the same fancy dress party as my daughter. I was in Pamplona last summer with my mate Paul who is a big Ramones fan and in one of those bizarre bits of good fortune we just happened to notice in the paper that ‘Marky Ramone and Friends’ were playing in town that night. We went along to see them, wondering if ‘and Friends’ was actually secret code for anyone famous. It was unlikely to be other Ramones as I think the only other survivors are, like Marky, all drummers. As it turned out Marky’s friends appeared to be exactly that, friends. Non musical friends too, it seemed. Maybe Dave, who he plays football with and Kev who lives two doors down. They certainly didn’t look like Ramones and didn’t even have the obligatory Ramones haircut that Marky has touchingly (or perhaps commercially) decided to persevere with. Maybe Dimitar should try and audition to be one of Marky’s new mates.

Whilst the main stand was full of old blokes and Ramones, the stand to the right was the home of the ‘Ultraboys Montana’. Outnumbered by their flags and banners, they cut a sorry sight. There were maybe twenty of them, all as quiet as librarians with sore throats. It’s a pity that there didn’t seem to be any Yantra fans in the ground, I’d have liked to see the Montana lads shushing them. Perhaps ultraboys means something else in Bulgarian. Mute, perhaps.

The game kicked off with Montana in white and blue and Yantra, who were two points ahead of them in green. Yantra didn’t even have a sponsor on their shirts, although I guess that there are only so many honey producers or straw and timber house builders to go around. Montana had the best of the early play but were limited to a single long range shot that the Yantra keeper almost let in by delaying his dive until the last possible moment.

Forty minutes in Montana opened the scoring with a header. The copper in front of me punched the air, then texted someone with the news. The police were quite laid back, watching the game and smoking as many fags as they could manage between texts. I don’t think that they were expecting much trouble from the Ultraboys, mind. Not unless somebody returned their library book late and wouldn’t pay the fine. Two minutes later and Yantra had equalised to the delight of their centre forward and the fury of the home crowd. The Yantra striker taunted the Montana fans, who gave him a lot of stick back.

At half time I walked around to the other side of the ground, stopping at the toilets on the way. They were reminiscent of Ayresome Park and I had a slash against the wall for old time’s sake. I almost took a picture too, but laid back as the coppers were, I thought a stranger in town taking photos of locals having a piss might just attract their attention.

The Yantra keeper was the man to watch in the second half. As Montana created more and more chances it became apparent just how useless he was. If he wasn’t backing away from the ball into his own net, he was lunging forwards, alternating between that 1940’s goalkeeping style based upon a bloke trying to catch a chicken or occasionally doing that diving celebration that seems compulsory these days for teams when they win a cup final. I began to suspect that he had got his goalie strip only after being behind Dimitar Ramone in the queue at the fancy dress shop and I found myself watching him through my fingers in a mixture of horror and embarrassment. I think the goalie watched the game in the same way actually. The ref wasn’t impressed either and midway through the half booked him, presumably for impersonating a professional footballer.

The best bit of the second half though was when the pantomime villain that was the Yantra number nine feigned injury. He took a bit too long to get onto the stretcher and so one of the Montana defenders just picked him up and dropped him on to it, a bit like when you drop a cat onto the settee back first to see if it can twist and land on its feet. He didn’t. The crowd roared, but not quite as much as they did when the Yantra baddie, on reaching the touchline, somersaulted off the stretcher and sprinting quicker than he had moved all day, ran seventy yards to rejoin the action. The copper near me even threw his fag away to gesture at him..

With fifteen minutes to go the Yantra keeper backed away one time too many and Montana took the lead. We got a final quarter an hour of bad tackles, feigned injuries, players and coaches jostling each other at every opportunity before Montana held on for the victory that moved them above Yantra and temporarily handed over the title of Bulgaria’s worst team. We filed out at the end, Dimitar Ramone off to his fancy dress party, the Ultraboys discussing the merits of the Dewey System and me to find a suitable bar to drink to the memory of an old friend.


And here are the photos

http://www.photobox.co.uk/album/7897374