Talking Benelux

My plans for a footballmungous Christmas now lie in tatters. The postponement of Barkingside's league game against Barking last Wednesday was the thin end of the wedge. Since then my planned entertainment at Crawley was frozen off (though I was already viewing the pub as a more favourable destination so wasn't too disappointed. However the relatively small amount of snow we had in East London on Friday morning was enough to make me think that a game was going to a bit of a miracle on Saturday. Saturday morning brought 'proper' snowfall and I began to wonder when I will next get to a game. The 3 games I was thinking of for tonight all went out of the window a long time ago  and I have just found out the match between Dulwich Hamlet and Romford has been unsurprisingly called off already. In fact I have just about given up on anything before Boxing Day and I'm not too hopeful there either. At some point on Boxing Day I will have to decide whether or not to abandon my trip to Lancashire. This has a dual purpose of seeing some football; but also allowing me to step foot in the town of my birth 35 years or so since I left. Sentiments will be put to one side. If football is looking more likely in Rymanlandia is looking more likely than Chorley or Preston then I will bin the trip for another, more clement, time.

Anyway. I already had a ridiculous football trip this year.

During the World Cup I made yet another attempt to stop smoking and with one small lapse have been successful. I rewarded myself with a quick trip to Luxembourg to see their hotly awaited encounter with Belarus in the Euro qualifiers. Luxembourg has always been an evocative name for me since England beat them 9:0 in the eighties. I remember my primary school teacher explaining where Luxembourg was for us the next day. Maybe I can blame him for the way the obscure and rubbish attracts me.

Luxembourg is a lovely place, although it isn't somewhere that I would like to be a bored adolescent. Ironically if I spoke French or German I would seriously think about relocating there. It has the advantages of being a capital city along with the positives points of a small town and in short time I was there I didn't spot any of the obvious downsides of either. It also  has a massive crevasse in the middle of it. Did anyone ever tell you that? A massive great crevasse with a forest and a river in it!

It's lovely but if you go into the travel agents where they sell tickets for the games on the day of the match they look at you as if you're crazy. So we headed off to the stadium a couple of hours before kick off. The plan being to pick up a couple of tickets and have a couple of beers. This proved to be a bit of a non-starter as there isn't a bar near the ground and they were only going to sell tickets once they opened the gates. We ended up drinking tinnies in the park before making our way back to the last bar we had seen on the way to the game.

The game had obviously captured my imagination more than that of the general populace as the stadium eventually struggled to about quarter capacity. There were a handful of Belarus ultras who I think would have been a bit tasty in other circumstances but were happy to trade chants with a bunch of 8 year olds. In the 10 Euro end the atmosphere was probably a little flatter than I'd hoped but there was a small of group of kids led by a heavy metal fan with a megaphone doing their best to cheer the team on. Belarus looked like a side who assumed they would score but after they went down to 10 men that looked increasingly unlikely. The Luxembourgeois versions of Kevin Davies and Carlos Tevez helped them on to a glorious point won. Which caused... Actually it didn't really cause anything. People made their way quietly home without any fuss. With expectations as low as Luxembourg's maybe real passion is difficult to drum up.

Andorra or the Faeroes next year then...