The following article appeared in the programme for Racing Club Warwick v Friar Lane & Epworth on 3rd March 2007.
The
ongoing saga of one man’s season.
Saturday
20th January – Market Drayton Town v Racing Club, Midland Football Alliance
It’s
January 20th and time for our second game of 2007 and only our
fourth match in nine weeks. It is also, for the ground hoppers amongst us,
Racing Club’s first ever visit to the Greenfields Sports Gound, home of Market Drayton
Town, newly promoted into
the Midland Alliance this season. It’s also one of our more distant matches.
Market Drayton’s ground is to be found down an unlikely looking lane that
appears to be the entrance to a scrap yard but reveals tennis courts, a rugby
ground and a couple of football pitches including that of our hosts. Market
Drayton’s social club clearly belongs to the entire sports club with its club
captain boards for the various sporting sections and is more-or-less deserted.
Worse is to come as the ground fails to sell any hot food for the travelling
hordes (well the six or seven Racing Club fans that made the effort to make the
journey) and we are reduced to pigging out on crisps. Racing Club give a good
account of themselves in the first half - something of an achievement given the
lack of match action over recent weeks. Sadly we then proceed to give away a soft
penalty on 55 minutes and the match ebbs away from our boys and we eventually
lose 2-0. Nevertheless I leave the ground heartened by a much better
performance from our boys. This defeat is the precursor to a few points a
fancy.
Sunday
28th January – Barcelona v Celta de Vigo, La Liga
Dedicated
followers of this column may recall that my other half treated me to a trip to Barcelona as a Christmas
present this year. The trip to the home of the reigning European Champions
began in the early hours of Saturday morning as my brother-in-law and I had an
early flight out of Luton to catch courtesy of
Easyjet (£60 return if you’re interested!). Two hours later and we emerged
blinking into the sunshine at Barcelona
airport and hailed a cab for the centre of town and our hotel. Having checked
in and collected our match tickets for the game the following night which had
been delivered to the hotel by courier, we headed off to Camp Nou and the
chance for a mooch around the museum and a stadium tour.
Camp Nou
(pronounced Camp Now according to our tour guide) holds
around 98,000 and has breathtakingly steep sides – a definite possibility of a
nosebleed if you’ve got one of those seats near the top. The behind the scenes
tour took us into the visitors dressing room, the tunnel area, pitch-side, the
directors box and the television gantry and cost around £8.00. Good value
although I must confess to being less than impressed by the dressing rooms
which looked nothing like as swish as their Premiership counterparts. We also managed
to have our photograph taken with Ronaldinho and Rijkaard (well life-sized
cardboard cut-outs anyway) before losing ourselves in the museum for a couple
of hours. I thought the museum was interesting if a bit quirky with its
eclectic collection of books and photographs where I would have expected to see
many more trophies and mementoes of matches past. One thing’s for sure, Barca
have certainly had their share of World Stars over the years with luminaries
such as Cruyff, Maradona, Lineker and Koeman having graced this famous stadium
prior to Ronaldinho’s arrival as Barcelona’s top player. With our appetites
well and truly whetted for tomorrow night’s big match we decided to satisfy a
different kind of appetite down at Port Olimpico and a slap up supper in one of
the nicer seafood restaurants that front up to the Mediterranean.
To make my evening even more enjoyable, text messages courtesy of Martin Rouse
informed me of Racing Club’s 2-2 draw at home to Atherstone earlier in the day.
Two quality goals courtesy of Matty Brown certainly helped the sangria go down
well in a little corner of Spain
I can assure you!
Sunday
is match day is Spain.
Most fixtures kick off in the evening. That is, apart from those that have been
pulled forward to Saturday to satisfy Spanish TV audiences. So we had a whole
day for sight seeing before the match itself. We took advantage of the time to visit
the 1992 Olympic Stadium that is now home to Barcelona’s other team: Espanyol. I rated the
Olympic Stadium as truly impressive and despite the construction works that are
currently underway as it receives an external make over. We even managed to
enjoy a coffee at the little cafeteria situated in the heart of the stadium.
The 1992 Olympics must have been really something - the venue for several of
the other events were situated nearby to the main stadium – in particular the
diving event must have had the most astonishing backdrop of the city itself. We
moved onto another Barcelona
icon, the Sagrada Familial, a Gaudi inspired modernist cathedral that featured
heavily on the BBC’s Olympic programming at the time. I’m not one for churches
but I have to say that the architecture at the Sagrada is remarkable and well
worth the visit. It’s also worth knowing that it’s not even finished yet! Work
started back in 1882 and the current estimated completion date is 2022. The
most magnificent tower of all is still at the planning stage!
It
was time to head off to Camp
Nou for the match. The
attendance for this evening’s game was 69,000 (i.e. well short of capacity) but
because the empty seats were mainly in the uppermost layer there was no sense
of a half empty stadium. One disappointing feature of the crowd for me was that
it seemed as if a high proportion of the spectators came from Britain! I suppose it’s cheeky of
me to whinge about the number of tourists in attendance since I was one myself
but you just don’t expect it somehow. Also, I shouldn’t really be too surprised
at the number of “foreign visitors” because if clubs in the English Premiership
insist on charging £55 and upwards for a ticket then a trip to Barcelona for a
match is definitely cost competitive - you can buy a match ticket to see the
European Champions for as little as £12 and get a flight there on Ryanair for virtually
nothing! Normally one disappointing feature of European football for a
collector like myself is the lack of an official programme at most matches. In
Barcelona’s case this was hugely mitigated by an official free colour newspaper
that covered everything you would expect to find in a standard British
programme - there was also a free magazine being given away by one of the TV
companies that covered the teams, line-ups and other relevant statistics too
(£3.00 for a Premiership programme anybody?).
The
match itself was an absorbing contest that flew by without ever being truly
exciting. Barcelona
retained the La Liga top spot by winning 3-1 and one of their goals was a
flamboyant top-left-hand corner penalty from Ronaldinho. Celta de Vigo looked a
solid outfit and much better than their lowly league position would indicate. I
tried hard to spot differences to normal Premiership fare and I suppose that
it’s wrong to draw too many conclusions from a single game. My impression was
that both sides were marginally better at keeping hold of the ball once they
had won it than their Premiership counterparts and they tended not to dive in
to win it back in the way that we often see in England. Technically there was
little difference to what we see on Match of the Day on most Saturday nights.
Overall I would contend that La Liga is of marginally higher quality than the
Premiership as evidenced by the relative success of clubs from the two
competitions over the last 5 years or so. So it’s yah boo sucks to everyone who
insists on telling us that the Premiership is the best League in the world! How
much foreign football do such “experts” see anyway?
Keep the faith!
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