The following diary reports were published
in the Yorkshire Sport Newspaper on the date shown:
June 6th 1998
Driven by an insatiable desire to watch the World Cup, enjoy a memorable
holiday in the sunshine, drain my overdraft, and tell the whole world about
it, I've ignored the advice of our Government and plan to absorb the world's
greatest Football tournament at first hand
By the time you read this, I will have completed the first chapter of
my cross-channel adventure. Just 24 hours after taking an Image Manipulation
exam at the University of Bradford, where I'm studying for a BSc (Hons)
in Electronic Imaging and Media Communication, I'll have docked in Cherbourg
for the time of my life. Our Gallic counterparts are seriously over-endowed
with sporting occasion during the summer, and I couldn't resist a closer
viewpoint. Jealous? Moi?
Before the world focuses it's attention on the festivities of France '98,
the Le Mans 24 hour race will merely whet my sporting appetite this weekend.
The race, an insomniac's dream, will mirror my lifestyle during a hedonistic
few days beforehand. Apart from the relentless last-minute revision and
the exam itself, packing and the necessary travelling will erode heavily
into what little breathing time I have left. After moving out of Bradford
for the summer, I first need to drive to deepest Lincolnshire, where I'm
wisely swapping my ageing Montego with a much newer and more trustworthy
Escort estate, kindly donated by my co-traveller Alistair's parents.
Next stop Southampton, to collect best-mate Al and his possessions, before
setting sail from Portsmouth. Fortunately, our native village just south
of Lincoln is twinned with the equally quaint, peasanty existence of a French
village within hopping distance of the famous Mulsanne straight. It'll be
bedtime when we arrive - trust me! My youth must count as an advantage -
I'm young enough not to know any better!
Whether we manage to lay on our hands on match tickets for the World Cup
over the next three weeks remains to be seen. At least I will have tried,
through means fair and foul, to witness the magical convergence of passion
and fanaticism generated by this unique event.
June 13th 1998
With our round-the-clock shenanigans at Le Mans now behind us, the holiday
began in earnest with some serious mileage towards Bordeaux.
Expectancy was in the air when we arrived at our campsite just south of
the city on Tuesday evening. They're expecting a frenzied invasion of the
kilt-wearing bagpipe-toting tartan army before their match here on Tuesday.
We ventured into Bordeaux on Wednesday afternoon, walking around the outside
of the stadium and accosting anyone looking sufficiently dodgy, to enquire
about tickets. A French journalist revealed he was meeting a contact from
Paris there that evening, and another suggested Rond-Point, a bar near the
stadium, where we found an ITV camera crew ingesting some afternoon refreshment.
Their interpreter, a friendly Corsican cameraman called Bruno, best mates
with ITV presenter Gabriel Clarke, volunteered to chase up some phone numbers
thrust into his hand by the barman.
Alistair soon negotiated a price of 2,000 francs for a pair of England
v Romania match tickets, which after a heated "should we? shouldn't we?"
internal debate, we accepted.
The impromptu outlay called for a brisk trip to the bank to convert some
traveller's cheques, before our rendez-vous back at the bar. Bruno agreed
to pop back to help the proceedings run more smoothly.
The touts, a couple of French students in their early 20s, rapidly escorted
us out of the bar and along a side street suitable for such a shady transaction.
Natasha, a female student with long ginger hair, who had already photocopied
her national identity card, handwrote a letter stating that we now had the
legal right to to her tickets with her name on. Except we now had an anxious
twelve-day wait until the match.
Anyway, with the World Cup kicking off in the Stade de France just minutes
later, we raced towards the plethora of bars in the city centre, piling
into Chez Auguste with just seconds to spare. In the Place de la Victoire,
the atmosphere crescendoed as the locals began to intermingle with the predominantly
Chilean footballing fraternity, helped by an open air concert which reverberated
around the City centre until the early hours.
Meanwhile, our enjoyment of the Morocco v Norway game was augmented by
an eight-piece jazz band, featuring an enormous tuba, who jammed their way
around the bar.
But by Friday morning, we had come to the unfortunate conclusion that
cheap and nasty French beer is equally unpleasant second time around!
June 20th 1998
If you'll excuse the clichι, it never rains but it pours. And for the
last week Alistair and I have seem to have been hotly pursued by our own
personal rain clouds, in addition to the hundreds in the sky anyway.
The plan had seemed perfect an early Saturday morning departure from
Bordeaux and 200km trailblaze to San Sebastian, to absorb some Spanish atmosphere
as their team took on the mighty Nigeria.
However, it was not to be. After becoming swept away in a wave of celebration,
as we gatecrashed a 5,000 strong French victory party at the giant screen
in Bordeaux, we awoke to every traveller's nightmare a car break-in.
As well as pilfering from an adjacent BMW and almost escaping in a camper
van, the opportunistic french thieves relieved Alistair of his wallet. A
trip to the nearby Gendarmerie and heated two-hour phone-call to the AA
later, our Escort's emergency was resolved. Having been quoted a £700 repair
frenzy by a local Ford garage, a free ten-minute patch-up - by those wonderful
men who can - was not to be sniffed at.
But the weather, not a ray of sunshine in five miserable days, and my
digestive system, not a ray of hope since a very dodgy undercooked burger,
still needed some attention. Our get away from it all, the great European
Escapade, almost needed getting away from itself.
Basque seaside resorts Biarritz and St. Jean-de-Luz provided a glamorous
backdrop for some dangerously familiar bar inhabiting, beer drinking and
widescreen watching. A breathtaking couple of days scaling the lower Pyrenees
en-route to Toulouse refreshed our enthusiasm as the English masses convened
with the Danish and South African boys still in town, anticpating their
clash the following day.
Persuading the municipal campsite they really did have room for two inconspicuous
Englishmen and their tent, was a protracted but ultimately successful process.
Mounted Police at reception displayed the fears of a nation reeling from
the unrest further eastwards at Marseilles.
With French newspaper L'Equipe's page-long condemnation of these "hooligans"
and almost the English race as a whole, it's easy to see why our hosts hold
such imbalanced views about our fans. Explaining to everyone that yes, we're
English, but no, we're not hooligans, is becoming a little embarrassing.
June 27th 1998
It was the most expensive football match I've ever been to, but 1,000 francs
was a small price to pay for participation in the World Cup Experience.
Disappointingly let down by a tame English performance, I was superficially
distraught that those Romanian upstarts had snatched the points until
the magic of the occasion hit home.
From the moment we arrived in Toulouse the previous Wednesday, until the
rousing rendition of God Save The Queen before kick-off, the build-up passed
without undue misdemeanour, to the extent that we were all rather proud
to be English again. Those few days had been tainted with media interest
most of it unhealthy. Our campsite had been besieged by BBC Radio One
Newsbeat, ITN and hordes of French journalists, who came, saw, and contrived
their opinions without stopping to realise that an English toe hadn't stepped
out of line.
The Municipal campsite in Toulouse was bursting at the seams as over 1,000
England fans had rammed themselves into a quarter of the space, with suitably
excitable atmosphere resulting.
The eve of the game culminated with a dozen slightly over-zealous English
boys dancing on top of the reception building, stark raving naked, swinging
Union flags and St. George's crosses as if their manhood depended on it!
You probably needed to be there to appreciate the good taste our optimism
was in
An over-endowment of patriotism can drive enthusiastic persons to wildly
celebrate their national identity. And I'll never forget our 90 minute circuit
of Toulouse with Union Jack proudly displayed out of the sunroof acknowledging
roadside support with a frenzied fanfare of horn-tooting! Although the match
itself ended in anti-climax for the 25,000 England fans within their theatre
of dreams, Al and I had acquired the all-too-expensive penchant for World
Cup stadia, and left Toulouse determined to catch another match. The grapevine
suggested that although every ticket had a price on it some would undeniably
tighten the purse strings more than others.
So what price USA vs Yugoslavia in Nantes? One solitary Franc just before
kick-off... according to a Serbian journalist intrigued by our Lincoln City
flag his penfriend hails from Louth! And although we didn't quite gain
entry as cheaply, the queue of pre-match vendors was astonishing.
Just in front of the turnstiles, literally hundreds of French touts frantically
waved their tickets aloft seeking our custom. We had already been accosted,
though by a Canadian: "Hi Guys, want some tickets at face value?"
The match itself, with both teams having little to play for - for contrasting
reasons - ran disappointingly true to form. In fact, it was almost eclipsed
by a detour through La Rochelle, the setting for my first ever French textbook,
Tricolore. One phrase which proved worthwhile was: "Je voudrais un billet
s'il vous plait" which ironcially, was all we needed to know some eight
years later.
July 4th 1998
The longest-lasting memories of this World Cup savoured by most England
fans would probably revolve around that captivating but fruitless confrontation
with Argentina on Tuesday. However, because I've been privileged enough
to witness the magical interaction between worldwide cultures at first hand
my thoughts and recollections will stay with me with even greater intensity.
That's why I went, after all.
The casually uninterested attitude towards the tournament by a disturbing
proportion of the home nation had to be seen to be believed three quarters
of Frenchmen in one bar played cards without batting an eyelid as another
team's aspirations finally subsided on the widescreen TV in front of them.
That's not to say the atmosphere throughout the country wasn't totally saturated
with World Cup fever, because the travelling support from each corner of
the globe eclipsed their enthusiasm, even if they were completely outnumbered.
Contrary to popular belief, the travelling English fans were
particularly intent on peacefully celebrating their presence at France '98
probably stung into action by the unsavoury few who had given their country
a tarnished image. This was certainly the case in Toulouse anyway.
Considering as reputations, especially bad ones, travel at the speed of
sound, and very few England fans can, we were always going to receive a
muted reception in Toulouse, after the trouble in Marseilles surrounding
the opening game against Tunisia.
After the fateful defeat, Glenn Hoddle said that apportioning blame would
not achieve anything not towards villain-turned hero-turned villain again
David Beckham, or spot-kick miscreants Paul Ince and David Batty. However,
the media, on both sides of the channel, seemed to have won their own battle
in misinforming the public into believing that each and every of the 30,000
visiting supporters from England, over double what any other country took,
had gone to cause as much trouble as possible.
Indeed, the pre-match party at our campsite in Toulouse, and the post
match celebrations after the Colombia game, which we watched at the giant
screen in Nantes, were the two most potent displays of patriotism we saw
during our 23 days in France. The camp-site, which had already been under
siege from ITN, BBC Radio 1 and several pre-opinionated French journalists,
had seemed the centre of media attention over the weekend before the game.
At least the issue seems to have died down quickly, now we no longer grace
the Coupe du Monde with our presence.
But not allowing the politics to detract from a completely mind and money-blowing
holiday, the £800 cost that Alistair and I each paid during those three
and a half weeks, was extremely well spent. The honour of standing inside
the stadium, supporting your national team in the World Cup, cannot itself
have a price put on it. Even though England undoubtedly saved their least
effective performance of the tournament for the game we saw, spotting our
flag for 8 clear seconds on the video last night almost made up for it!
Before we left, Al and I were completely unsure about how easy or difficult
it would be to a) get hold of tickets, within our student price-range, and
b) get into the stadium with them think of that TV commercial recommending
we didn't go across at all. We paid £100 per ticket for the England game
buying the tickets twelve days beforehand in Bordeaux, but got into USA
vs Yugoslavia for a face value £15. For most low-demand matches, tickets
could probably be picked up for around £25 or even cheaper.
And if I've tickled your tastebuds by daring to hop over to France and
sneaking in to catch a match, bear in mind that Euro 2000 will be jointly
staged in Belgium and Holland, which are no further away than Paris. Now
who's up for that?
