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.
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.
1 comment:
I just love the thought of Sally Gunnell's water jump being boarded up and her long jump being fenced off. I bet her hubby is gutted.
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