Matt's World Cup Diary
Day 10 – Ukraine v Switzerland – Cologne

Even thinking about this game makes me feel sleepy.

We were lucky to get there though, the run of games had confused me and I was certain we were going to Dortmund on this day and it was only a ‘see you tomorrow’, ‘don’t you mean see you on Tuesday’ conversation with a mate of Simon’s that tipped us off to the fact that we needed to make the journey down to Cologne. Still at least there were no tram accidents when we did get there.

First the good news – we’d been given restricted view seats for this game (no that’s not the good news) – but on arrival we found our seats were first row upper tier directly behind the goal – possibly the least restricted view it is possible to get. We also met up with Big Al, who’d driven across from the England game the previous day to use up our spare ticket, and thereby missed the birth of his second child.

I never leave games early and couldn’t imagine I’d do so for a World Cup game, but this was a shocker and once the game entered extra time we had to make a decision whether to stay to the bitter end thereby missing the fast train back and getting to Essen nearer 3AM than 1AM otherwise. We unanimously voted to leave and weren’t the only ones. We even saw the penalties at the station bar, so didn’t really miss anything at all.

We actually spent most of the game chatting, which was fairly similar to a lot of Leeds games I went to last year, though I guess something’s always more likely to happen when Shevchenko rather than Rob Hulse is on the pitch in front of you.

There was the odd attack in the Ukraine game