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
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
No comments:
Post a Comment