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