Matt's World Cup Diary

Day 8 – No games

A first day for a week without football and time for 5 more of our group to go home. Except 2 of them don’t, as their car breaks down within 5 minutes of leaving the hotel and after a day in garages and talking to insurance companies they end up spending another day in the same place before flying home.

Spending all your days, watching football on a big screen, then going to a game, then going back to a bar to watch another game, is actually proving quite tiring. So the remaining 3 of us decline Danny’s offer to watch the Germany game at Bochum stadium with 20,000 Germans. This is partly because we’re too lazy to spend 2 hours waiting in the sun before the game starts (apparently it’s full up by then) and partly because we don’t want to feel like gatecrashers at someone else’s party.

However we’re all happy to see Germany win – something we wouldn’t have thought possible a couple of weeks before – but the German hospitality has been truly excellent. We’re also close enough to see some of the celebrations as the locals leave the Town Square, which has been converted into a beach for the duration of the tournament.