Matt's Euro 2004 Diary Some background. We applied for tickets over a year ago. Once the draw was made we found we were watching Latvia twice, so decided to become Latvian fans for the duration of the holiday / tournament, Day 1 Get Latvia flags out in bar at Heathrow – attract a few "What the F*** is that" type queries from England fans scattered around, including one from an American Newcastle fan who claims to come from York. He thinks Malaga is near Lisbon. We arrive in Porto. Bags don’t, despite the fact that we saw them piled up next to the plane in Madrid.
Hear a girl scored against the Lards for the second time this year. Taxi driver touches 150kph on way to hotel Day 2 Bags still not arrived, so despite it being 35 degrees we’re wandering round in jeans. The town we’re staying in, Povoa de Varzim, is an official Euro 2004 town, 20 miles from Porto. To celebrate the Portuguese decided to extent the Porto metro to it and therefore closed the station down. Unfortunately they didn’t manage to finish the metro in time, making the town pretty inaccessible – luckily taxis are cheap and plentiful, if a little scary. A motley collection of English, Danish and Swedes watch the France game on the big screen, in the town square, just finishing uttering the phrase, "Well a draw isn’t a bad result against France" when Steven Gerrard attempts a back pass. Annoy some Norwegians who are here supporting Denmark (?), by singing "Are you Sweden in disguise." In desperation we go and buy some more clothes. Bags arrive whilst we are in the shop. Day 3 Hotel now full of Danes, they are somewhat bemused by the Leeds Latvians flag. Investigate local area. Locals are really friendly but generally dismiss the Portuguese team as too old. Discover the Francesinha – a huge 5 layer sandwich type thing filled with sausage, bacon, egg and covered in tomato sauce. Taxi driver gets up to 160kph on the 4 km journey to town. Day 4 - Germany v Holland – Porto Dragao Swap Leeds flag for Portsmouth Latvians one, Danes now utterly confused. In a bar pre-game watching Latvia v Czechs. Dutch band goes by, we go out to watch and see they are being followed by a horde of orange clad fans. Thirty minutes later the parade of Tango men and women has not finished, we decided to follow them to the ground and bump into Chris Kamara on the way.
At turnstiles bump into Chris Kamara again. See him again, inside the ground, I think Chris Kamara is stalking me. A sea of orange opposite to us, the 3 people in the Dutch end not wearing orange must feel pretty stupid. Unfortunately the Dutch are crap and Germans look like winning for most of the game. Dutch are reduced to lumping it forward for Van Hooijdonk, before horseface scores an admittedly fine equaliser. After game decide to go for a quick getaway to get back to the waterfront bar area before it’s too mobbed. Unfortunately get lost in Porto’s narrow streets and get there after everyone else. 30,000 singing Dutch crammed into the small square, luckily none of them want to sit down so we get a table anyway. Day 5 - Portugal v Russia – Lisbon Estadio de Luz A trip down to Lisbon – taxi driver gets up to 160kph on way to station. Very smooth journey down to Lisbon and soon meet up with Big Al before the game, the proper Stadium of Light is pretty impressive, though atmosphere seems pretty low key to begin with. It livens up when Portugal score and they cruise to victory , partly due to an outrageous sending off of the Russian keeper. Surrounded by Portugal fans we decide not to make a big deal of it.
On the way home find out it’s not too easy to get your bearings when Portuguese fans keep running out in front of you waving flags. This country knows how to celebrate. Day 6 - France v Croatia – Leiria A leisurely morning in scenic Sintra, before it’s off to Leiria, halfway there we release Mark’s forgot his ticket so a mad dash back and forth ensues. Realise we are not going to reach Leiria before the England games kicks off. Swerve off motorway just before KO and pile into nearest bar. Locals rather surprised, we are in the middle of nowhere, but like the profit they get on selling beer to happy English for couple of hours.
Off again, Portugal’s preparation for the tournament didn’t involve putting up any signs for the ground from the motorway. So we zoom around Leiria, nice castle, and make it in the nick of time. Bit of a queue at the turnstile, largely England fans who’ve also stayed in the bar to watch the previous match. They didn’t finish building this one, we’re sitting in a temporary standard, good view though. Croatian fans are noisy and obnoxious and very few of them actually seem to come from Croatia. Nevertheless we support them till we realise a Croatian win is not good news for England, so not too upset by France’s dodgy equaliser. Day 7 - Bulgaria v Denmark – Braga A mad rush back up country to the Northern most host city, only slightly delayed by the Danes weak bladders which meant the train had to keep stopping whilst they had a piss on the platform. Hordes of Danes with some German support, not a lot of Bulgars, so we buy a flag. Braga’s ground has been carved out of a mountain, after appearing to have walked up and down the mountain to find it, we find or seats are in the very back row. Like putting Newcastle's away end on top of the East Stand at Elland Road. Given that the local team average 3000 crowds I doubt anyone will ever sit up here again. Down on the pitch the Bulgarian ants are utterly useless and Danish ants cruise to a comfortable win, game only livens up in last 15 minutes when Bulgars are miffed by a decision and decide to kick the sh*t out of the Danes. Thomas Graveson is main target, which is quite funny. Flurry of cards follows. Spend most of game attempting to eat our way through large bag of popcorn. Fail. Bulgarian performance not worth the price of the flag. Day 8 - Latvia v Germany – Porto Bessa At breakfast find out that a load of Bulgarians are now in the hotel. Fifth day in a row at a game – 5th different ground. Travel down to Porto with the Leeds Latvians flag displayed in the back window of the bus, and our faces painted with Latvia flags. Soon find out that everyone loves Latvia, as we receive good luck wishes from Danes, Swedes, English, Dutch etc. Slightly embarrassing though when some genuine Latvians talk to us and we have to admit to being the English type of Latvians. Avoid eye contact with the next group of Latvians who walk past us only to notice their flag says Birmingham City on it.
Latvia play very well and Germany really don’t have any idea how to break them down. Verpakovskis is the best player on the pitch and nearly scores a superb solo goal and goes down in the area but doesn’t get the penalty.
Latvians fully deserve their draw and celebrate with their fans at the end of the game. As the Germans leave, we’re left alone waving our Latvia flags at the other end, the players spot us and run down our end to thank us for the support. I suspect they’re still wondering which part of Latvia Leeds and Portsmouth are in. Bump into El Tel outside, resist the urge to harangue for his useless Management of Leeds and instead ask him if Latvia should have had a penalty. He appears so shocked about how good my English is for a Latvian that he stammers yes and runs away.
After a few beers completely forget about face paint and careless rubbing of my cheeks leads to a clown like pink splurge. More fun than a season of watching Leeds. Day 9 A day of rest.
Watch Portugal v Spain in the square in Povoa. Place erupts when Spain scores, doesn’t take long to learn the Portuguese fans song, Portugal-Ole, Portugal-Ole. After the game it becomes very dangerous, everyone is flying around the narrow streets at 150kmph, too scared to attempt to cross the road. Day 10 Mark disappears off to Lisbon to see the England game, rest of watch in the square. Only 3 of us England fans plus about a dozen Swedes, yet we have about 10 police watching over us. An observation - there seem to be 3 sets of fans at the games. The fans from the 2 teams playing plus a large group of English / British fans. Most of these seem to have no intention of actually going to watch England and indeed have based themselves in the North to maximise their football watching (4 host cities within 50 miles of Porto), whilst avoiding the crap that goes with being an English football fan abroad. Pictures of England fans in Albufeira regularly pop up on local teles. English fans to tend to out-number the local Portuguese at the grounds, and the profile of the ‘home’ fans is very different than at home, largely families as opposed to the young / middle-aged males that probably make up 90% of crowds in England. I have no idea why this is. Can’t work out if all the female Bulgarians are the players wife’s or not. Day 11 - Sweden v Denmark – Porto Latvia flags get another airing to general bemusement. Lots of Scandinavian songs sung in the bar pre-game, no idea what they were about, but assume they are not for family consumption by the reaction.
A cracking end to end game in pouring rain, in front of passionate and noisy fans which ended with them both going through and the Italians going out. Danes again looked a good team and could have won it but the Swedes late equaliser was a perfect outcome. After the equaliser the Swedes play keep ball through injury time and the Danes make no attempt to get it back, the thought of paranoid Italians only added to the joy. Lots of celebrating at the end. No trace of a fix but the sheer inevitability of it was compelling. Realise halfway back to Povoa that the taxi driver is completely pissed. We should have guessed earlier as he’s only going 100kph. Unfortunately it’s difficult to get out whilst veering around on the motorway. Day 12 - Holland v Latvia – Braga Sit behind a complete looney on the bus, who burns his shoes and jabbers manically throughout the journey. Only realise why he’s in Braga later than night. Not quite so high up this time, but still separated from our Latvian brethren. Three Latvia flags in an ocean of Orange. Unfortunately the team seem to have run out of steam and Holland win comfortably. Main entertainment is watching the Dutch fans trying to get the score from the Germany – Czech game. At one point the rumour spread like wildfire that Germany were behind and everyone started leaping around – unfortunately at the time it wasn’t true. Eventually the Czech’s did go ahead so we were treated to the sign of loads of Dutch fans chanting Czechie Czechie.
Tonight was the festival of San Joao, where apparently the townspeople celebrate by wandering around hitting each other with plastic hammers. On leaving the ground there’s a few people, mainly small kids, around with their hammers, which is quite cute. We go for something to eat and come back out an hour later to find the streets heaving with thousands of hammer-wielding looneys. Getting hit so often we have to buy hammers ourselves as a defence mechanism. After an hour or so of hammering people, we decide to head home. Unfortunately taxi rank is the other side of the town square and it takes about 90 minutes to get through all the people, there must be 200,000 people wandering around with hammers and we probably got hit on the head 1000 times. I’d imagine that was the best festival of San Joao ever, with 30,000 Dutch fans. One of the maddest nights I’ve ever had in my life. Day 13 Bulgarian team have gone home, Bulgarian women are still here. Conclude they are the concubines for the fat officials. Decide to stay in hotel to watch England v Portugal game, we could well get lynched otherwise. Portuguese tele start their coverage hours in advance and do the old Cup Final Grandstand following the bus to the ground trick. Except they don’t show the odd shot of it, they show it for hours on end, it’s like watching OJ Simpson again. Just us and the hotel staff who keep peering round the corner to see the score. Retaliate by sending them for food and beer whenever Portugal look like scoring. England lose but not too gutted, we didn’t get a replay of Campbells disallowed goal and general feeling is if you don’t try and attack you don’t really deserve to win. Day 14 The only English language channel we have is Eurosport. They’ve been showing previous Euro Champ matches all holiday, we now know the score of every match in the history of the tournament, plus scores and linesman's inside leg measurement. Taxi driver to town gets up to 180kmph Notice my belly has grown during the course of the holiday, too many Francesinhas and too much Super Bock. It’s also bright red from floating around in the pool. Feel ready for Worldnet. Conclusion Good football, Excellent Weather, Great People – What more do you want from a holiday. Matt the Latvian Postscript It’s the day of the final, which has just finished and there’s about 10,000 Greeks going mad outside my flat in North London. Just like being on holiday again.
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