Triple Dutch proved one trip too much

It would be folly to focus too much of my World Cup final report on the match itself. For one, it was a horrific spectacle. Secondly, the team of the nation I watched the match in failed to win, score or endear themselves to just about anybody. Thirdly, despite having travelled for a month in anticipation of these 90 minutes, I didn’t pay much attention to it - I’d deduced the above factors within five minutes of the match kicking off. Sometimes games are slow starters that always retain a sense of intrigue throughout, often with the potential to explode into life. However, others you can call as a shocker before most of the players have touched the ball. A few people in England have since told me they quite enjoyed the game, but I suspect that has more to do with gratuitous violence and the overwhelming challenge Howard Webb was presented with.

In any case, even if the game had encapsulated me into watching all 120 minutes intently then I would have been in some serious discomfort due to strains on my neck, packed as Museumplein was from the late afternoon onwards:


The Dutch media reported that over a million had descended on the capital specifically to watch this match. Considering Amsterdam has a population of around 800,000, you can imagine it was quite the influx – which would explain why I found it near impossible to find anywhere to both enjoy a meal and watch the Germany-Uruguay third place play off the previous evening. Ultimately, I had to settle on a place where the owner had to be prompted by customers to wipe the tables clean and they gave me dinner without a fork (the child serving me seemed quite offended when I asked for one.)

Pre-match, merriment encompassed the city as far as the eye could see, whether it be with some Spanish-Dutch unity or folk just taking in some music:





Once I reached Museumplein, this sense of occasion upgraded its manifestations to piggybacks, climbing on top of lampposts and helicopters dropping flowers from the sky. “You know the police have told people not to come here today,” said one Oranje fan. “They say the city is full! No chance man, just look at this place… There’s people smoking joints out here man, this is just one big party!” Yeah, well, that’s not all they were smoking:


Still, you have to been smoking something stronger still to come to the conclusion that Holland deserved to win that match. Spain once more showed the indisputable irritating sense of perfection that dictated the trophy was worthily theirs. The Dutch defence weren’t stretched beyond all recognition nor was Maarten Stekelenburg’s goal peppered, but that’s entirely the point: like the three 1-0’s that preceded this, the result seemed beyond doubt and the Spanish seemed in complete control despite not offering a regular attacking threat. They just hold onto the ball and wait for the right moment – even if they have to wait until minute 118. So hearty congratulations to La Roja, which I’m sure that will mean a great deal to them coming from me.

As for the Dutch aggression, no one seemed to comment on it – people were more irritated that on the rare occasions they did have the ball, they did so little with it. Equally I felt little in the way of anti-Webb feeling – people didn’t seem to bemoan individual decisions, rather just the ultimate result: a third World Cup final loss. Cue emotional scenes:


My total record, by the way, reads: P15, W6, D3, L6. F15, A14. Curiously the six wins all came in a row (admittedly only achieved by Germany, Holland and Spain) as did the three draws.

Which just leaves me, regrettably, to wrap up. Firstly some thank yous. A huge thanks to my parents who, as well as making big contributions towards the trip being a possibility in the first place, also stepped in to help turn Madrid from a crisis into a mere inconvenience. Thank you to my employers, who did little more than raise an eyebrow when I told them I’d be away for the entire duration of the World Cup. Thank you to everyone who expressed an interest in this blog – even if this may have just been family and friends, most of whom have probably stopped reading by now, you at least encouraged me to pen to paper. Thank you to Andrew Jennings, Simon Kuper and Stefan Kzymanski for providing informative and entertaining reads for long, long train journeys. And, if you’re reading guys, a massive thanks to those of you who drafted and later signed the Schengen Agreement of 1985 and the Maastricht Treaty of 1992 – your vision of a unified Europe really helped to make things easier, lads. And Timothy Berners-Lee, the man credited with inventing the internet – you are a legend.

The biggest thanks, however, must of course go to all those who made the travelling worthwhile. So, in chronological order, a massive shout out to Kostas and George; Snezana, Marija and Milica; Harry; Vlasto, David, Andrew, Andreas, Igor and the entire squad of the School of Slavonic and Eastern European Studies Association Football Club; Sara, Jure, Vanč, Ryan, Christina, Justin, Denise, Lana, Bole and Marco; Christor, Emir, Marco, Corrado and Luca; Nelly and David; Jilles and Yannick; Philip Rance, Daniel, Ralf, Ludwig, Paul, Julian, Philip Elam; Leen, Stefan, Rob, Ramon, Ron, Omar, Marcos, Jon, Joe, Alex, Peter, Lana, Chris, Jenelle, Brett, Laura, Ellen and Sam; Miguel, Jan, Sonia, Anthony, Kevin, Matt, Mike and Russ; and to Sam and Paul.

In particular, I must make a special point of thanking Snezana Bucic, Sara Soukal, Philip Rance and Jan and Sonia Fairey for going above and beyond to accommodate me. You guys most definitely make the team of the tournament.

So the moral of the story? Well, the corrupt incompetent insular and morally bankrupt group of people that run this game and retain full responsibility for the organisation of its flagship tournament, and the lucrative privileges that come with it – FIFA to you or me - will consistently refer to football’s, and the World Cup’s, power to bring people together. They will hark wistfully about how they facilitate the game’s ability to transcend race, class or gender the world over, from Algeria to Argentina. They’ll speak in the most corny of terms about romance, friendship, tolerance or passion. They’ll try and claim credit for all of the above.

Do, and don’t, listen to them. Listen to them because, corny as it might be, a lot of it is true. What I have seen first hand is that when a World Cup comes round, the buzz spreads like nothing else. There is simply no other occasion where I could find myself sitting alongside some Norwegians cheering on some Italians; at what other time could I, immediately upon introduction, enter into a debate with a Portuguese couple and their Greek friends in central Bratislava; when else could a pair of Americans cheer at the worst possible time in the midst of an overwhelmingly partisan Slovenian crowd and get away with it? If you live in a major city come the next one, get out there and see this – the multicultural times we live in mean you’re never far from someone who will have an interest in almost any game. And trust me, it makes the games a lot more fun when you’re with someone who cares.

Don’t, however, listen to FIFA because it’s got nothing to do with those clowns. Indeed, the games governing body in fact, through their blind arrogant blundering, serve to highlight the incredible power of the game as opposed to facilitate it – it takes a great game to bring the world together; it takes a truly special game to continue to bring the world together despite for decades and decades being in the grasp of greedy power-crazed beaurocrats.

Summarising the incredible power of the game, I’ll leave the final words to Nelly, a ridiculously captivating 80-something year old former languges teacher from Luxembourg whom I met on a train from Milan to Zurich. When discussing Italian celebrations she had witnessed following the previous tournament’s final, the woman apparently known as ‘The Priest Eater’ in her home country for her passionately secular views, highlighted to me just how dumbfoundingly popular the game really is: “The Pope must be jealous,” she said with a smile. I may have gone seeking to live off other teams’ glorious results, but for that moment I basked in the most glorious scoreline I had ever heard: Religion 0 Football 1. Like Spain, the result was never in doubt.

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GREECE 0-2 South Korea
SERBIA 0-1 Ghana
SLOVAKIA 1-1 New Zealand
SLOVENIA 2-2 USA
ITALY 1-1 New Zealand
SWITZERLAND 0-1 Chile
FRANCE 1-2 South Africa
GERMANY 1-0 Ghana
HOLLAND 2-1 Cameroon
HOLLAND 2-1 Slovakia
SPAIN 1-0 Portugal
SPAIN 1-0 Paraguay
HOLLAND 3-2 Uruguay
GERMANY 0-1 Spain
HOLLAND 0-1 Spain

Überschadenfreude

So it was in Berlin where the idea that I’d kept a decent eye on my possessions evaporated once and for all, as well as being the location for a return to losing ways.

On that fateful train to Berlin (the laptop continued on somewhere towards Poland) I knew that for one, they had to party fairly substantially for Germany to overturn the considerable bias I already felt towards Holland in terms of a decision as to where to watch the final, and that for two, they had a job on their hands winning in the first place. But I thoroughly believed they would – Germany, not Spain, had played the best football of the tournament thus far, despite the howls of denial from the ignorant Alan “most average German team I’ve ever seen” Hansen. Just because you haven’t heard of the players, that doesn’t make them average Alan.

So I naturally assumed they’d take this form into their semi, and boy did the Germans assume it too. The thing is, even when the Germany side genuinely is average, the German people are still somewhat alien to concept of losing. So when the Germany team just put eight goals past England and Argentina, the fact that their opposition don’t really lose games either doesn’t register as particularly relevant.

The location for this one could only be the Brandenburg Gate fan mile. Unfortunately that picture is where the visual documentation of my time in Berlin ends, camera calling time on his battery life immediately afterwards. Nonetheless, due to the narrow multi-screened nature of the venue, there was absolutely no way of capturing (or comprehending) the vast numbers in attendance. At 300,000 strong, this was most certainly my biggest crowd of the tour.

Apologies for any keen Germans reading, because like the post before this, the one before that and what is to follow, this is to once more become about the Dutch. I thought in Sam and Paul I was choosing a unique story – two young guys, one in Dutch orange, one in German white - I assumed by striking conversation with the pair I’d be on for a night of quality Euro-banter as we cheered Deutschland onto that final we all wanted, sparking a late evening of debate over whose asses would be kicked by whom and in what manner.

Turns out they were both Dutch. Paul was, incredibly, just so desperate for a Holland-Germany final that he’d gone out and bought a cheap Germany shirt to display his support, presumably to be burnt in some sort of ceremony ahead of the final. So in seeking England fans in Munich I had encountered Germans wearing England shirts; now while trying to corner a German fan in Berlin, I ended up with a Dutchman in his arch enemy’s colours. They sure do things differently on the continent.

Paul and Sam were vintage Dutch, casually mocking the German team, people and language, while simultaneously gaining their friendship. Well, that is until the 73rd minute onwards, where the atmosphere dipped somewhat. Once more, the alien concept had manifested itself and they were out (whisper it quietly, but with two final defeats and two semi final defeats in the last eight years the German image is fast developing from inglorious victors to glorious losers).

But we just couldn’t resist but stay and observe. Despite all three of us possessing a genuine sense of warmth towards German people, being two Dutch guys and one English guy you simply cannot watch swathes and swathes of miserable angry Germans file past you, and not break out in a vast smirk. Of course no Englishman has anything to be smug about, but that doesn’t matter – the six-year-old boy in me who remembered Euro ‘96 would have wanted me to enjoy this. Schadenfreude derived from Germans is the ultimate Schadenfreude. Uberschadenfreude, they’d probably call it, if they had any idea how it felt.

The wittiest comment of the day came from another Dutchman, who quietly spoke into Sam’s ear as thousands of bowed heads marched past. “Yeah well, this is how they made us walk for five years.” Well, I did say wittiest, not most politically correct.

Sam, in his bright Hup Holland Hup t-shirt certainly attracted attention, but – with the exception of two nasty drunks who spat on him - it was overwhelmingly positive. Well, kind of. “You must kill those Spanish,” they said, again and again, so I was told every time I asked for a translation. It appeared the Germans have now developed a mechanism to deal with the anger of losing: direct it at the team who just beat you.

So back on the train to Amsterdam it was. It was the third time in ten days I’d be in the city alone, but it would be the first time ever that I’d experienced a World Cup final atmosphere.

When Glastonbury meets Wembley

Firstly, apologies for my sudden extended period of silence during the climactic week of this summer’s football. I would love to be able to excuse it by bemoaning my luck or apportioning blame elsewhere, but the be all and end all is I left my laptop on a train that was heading to Poland. As a result I am a little, though not completely, short on some pictures and videos, but will endeavour to tell the tale of how the quarter finals onwards went down in the tournament’s most successful continent.

First, I must cast your mind, and my own, back to my last update. I’d just left Catalonia and was heading towards Valencia to enjoy Spain’s quarter final vs Paraguay. What I am missing now is two things, taken from the very same bar: 1) Some photos of some mortified Argentineans following the 3^rd and 4^th goals from Germany in their quarter final; 2) Footage of one ultra-passionate man celebrating, commiserating and generally getting wound up by Spain’s topsy-turvy encounter. In particular, I regret that I can’t show you his exuberant fist-pumping and friend-hugging nature once Xabi Alonso had tucked away a penalty, only for him to be tapped on the shoulder and informed the ref had disallowed it. You’ll have to take my word that his subsequent expression when the re-taken penalty was saved was, indeed, a picture.

The rest of the Spanish however seemed strangely mellow towards the result, Valencia resuming relative normality almost immediately following the full time whistle. Just ask Matt, Mike and Russ, three Americans who I overheard bemoaning the lack of car honking or flag waving in the streets as I sat down for some dinner:

Perhaps you might think it unusual for people from the States to bemoan a lack of World Cup passion but don't let the backwards baseball caps put you off - in fact almost every American I encountered on this trip were not only keen on the tournament but also possessed a knowledge of it which belies their soccer-ignorant reputation. Once I interrupted their private conversation and explained that I’d discovered something of a country-to-country variation in ‘World Cup fever’, they invited me to join their table; I duly ate Russ’s salad when the waitress accidentally served it to me; they duly paid for it. “You’re the first guy who’s actually spoke to us on this trip,” they said. Three other more stereotypically obnoxious and loud-mouthed Americans bothering the locals on a table nearby perhaps illustrated why. Sensible minded yanks suffer guilt by association like no other.

With hindsight, we can comfortably say we should have all be in Spain a week later if we wanted a party. However I was headed back to central Europe once La Roja had secured their semi final place, eager as I was to witness both Holland and Germany’s semi finals on ‘home’ soil. In anticipation for the match against Uruguay, Amsterdam had certainly increased its oranje factor by the time I’d completed my 24 hour train ride, the city buzzing more so than any encountered thus far on the trip. Rob, whom I had met on the last visit, tipped me off about Museumplein, which would be housing a giant screen – as well as around 40,000 – 60,000 Dutch fans, depending on your source.

It was to be a delightful combination of the atmospheres one would expect from both a music festival and a football match: mischief, humour and hedonism met passion, raucousness and colour and thankfully I retain some pictures and footage which illustrate this. For example, here is a game the Dutch like to play when there’s a lull in play – it’s called Throw the Toilet Roll, and delightfully the girl in front got one on the head:

It generally takes something special to distract Hollanders from such merriness, so it was a good thing Giovanni van Bronckhorst finally delivered the World Cup belter we’d all been waiting for. Celebrations were wilder still once Wesley Sneijder made it two:

But the real fun was to be had at the afterparty, once the full time whistle went (after one false start) and Holland had secured their place in the World Cup final for the first time since 1978. Cue Viva Hollandia:

From Museumplein is the short walk / bike ride to Leidseplein where the masses descended for the biggest Tuesday night gathering of the year:

You may notice towards the end of the preceding video the garbage truck comandeered by jubilant crowds, ultimately resulting in the police force having to live up to their killjoy billing and seize back the vehicle, one would presume for the good of the recycling scheme. Ungracious descents from the top of the cab ensued:

The scenes were excessive and enthralling, and went long into the night. If Germany were to do the business, then Berlin had some party to match if it was to persuade me to stay for the final. One fan, a rare example of someone who wanted to avoid the Germans in the final, even told me not to head east once I’d explained where I’d been so far: after six victories in a row, I was even being considered a good luck charm.

World Cup joy: it really does get everywhere

In the kind of bizarre sense this trip is working out, I have now come across the World Cup party atmosphere I was looking for - in a country over 1500 kilometres away from any participants in the match I watched. En route to Valencia, I made a brief stop in Catalonia for a couple of days. Don’t think Catalonia would be a hotbed for partisan World Cup passion? Nor did I. Then I discovered Salou. The costal town represents a somewhat untainted Costa del Sol or Benidorm - i.e. a successful beachside holiday resort, with plenty of foreigners (and even a Wetherspoons) but lacking in the ultra-intoxicated stag parties spewing up onto its pavements. And the other thing it has is Dutch people. Lots and lots of happy-go-lucky holiday makers from the Netherlands. So when I heard this was the case, plans to visit Barcelona were shelved and I headed to a Dutch bar to watch Holland’s quarter final vs Brazil.

Accompanied by Anthony - we’ll call him a friend of the family because explaining his link to me via my mother and various other people would be too laborious and probably not all that interesting - we spotted The Ski Hut as soon as the bus pulled into Salou, a particularly oranje decorated establishment. Indeed not only did we spot the Hut itself, we also spotted the various orange-clad employees lining the street attempting to coax as many Dutch people through its door as possible. And they did a decent job - come kick off the atmosphere has developed into a bit of a mini-Amsterdam, minus the whiff of pot or the billions of bicycles.

Naturally the atmosphere suffered due to Holland’s somewhat muted first half performance. But, for once, this represented one match where my so called ‘prophecies’ actually rang true. Pre-match I said “You will win 2-1,” to Kevin, just about the most decorated of all the Netherlanders in the bar. And at half time I said to him: “You need some Sneijder magic.” Whether a fairly hopeful cross from deep which was turned into the net by a Brazilian defender and a header from five yards really classes as ‘magic’ is debatable but I’m regarding my utterances as wise and true nonetheless.

Kevin was, of course, just one of many who erupted with joy following the full time whistle. Along with that video, there are so many joyous scenes I managed to capture on camera and should you meet me in person in the forthcoming months I’ll probably show you some of the material which didn’t make it here. Nonetheless, I’ve tried to upload as much as possible to give you a colourful display of images rather than words for this particular entry. Let’s just say, with this particular flag bearing group making themselves known to every vehicle on the road whether they liked it or not, the people of Salou would be hard pressed to remain oblivious to the result that evening.



Is that Owen Wilson carrying the flag? Could be.

But what’s that I hear you say: what about the camera of pain? The inflictor of misery? Surely a day didn’t go by where I didn’t capture some form of World Cup disappointment? Of course not. Bizarrely, in the small Catalonian town of Valls I found myself watching Uruguay v Ghana with strong Ghana supporters behind me and Uruguayans watching through the window. Particular bizarre considering that when myself and Jan, another, let’s say, family friend, arrived in the so called Barça bar (due to the fact the walls are covered in FC Barcelona posters) it was empty and they didn’t even have the game on - the barmaid had to be prompted by us. Within minutes of changing the channel, the place was suddenly packed out with African followers - or, at the very least, sympathisers.

And you know what I did when Ghana were awarded a penalty in the very last seconds of Extra Time: I got the camera out. I truly regret, however, that I stopped filming the second the penalty was missed - I think part of me thought I was going to get beaten up. But you’ll be delighted to know that come the shoot out I also zoomed in on my unfortunate African friends for Dominic Adiyiah’s poor penalty, complete with Uruguayan celebrations (it would appear that she is giving me the finger at the very start - perhaps she knows what this camera can do):



What I enjoyed most about the winning spot kick was that the South American Señor wasn’t even watching, too consumed as he was with lighting his cigarette. Wifey lead the celebrations, and the Barça bar went from busy to empty literally within seconds - you can see many of the African supporters streaming out in the background:



At the time of writing, I am on a train away from Catalonia towards the city of Valencia for Spain’s quarter final tonight. I’ll of course try and find a bar with Argentineans and/or Germans this afternoon, and from there I will make the 24 hour mammoth train journey back to Amsterdam for Holland’s semi final against Uruguay. Wesley Sneijder may not know it but he may well have just saved this trip from culminating in a two week holiday in Spain. Not that I have anything against Spain, but the itchy-footed traveller in me salutes him.