My Football Cities

By Simon Pask

As a life-long football fan and also a lover of travel, Simon Pask combines the two in this intimate collection of football-led travels throughout Europe. For armchair football followers, the book serves as a virtual tour around many of the hotbeds of European football, whilst for those keen to experience the stadiums and cities themselves, there are many practical tips on how to make the trips a reality, including some ideas on multi-match weekends. This book covers vast ground: you’ll find major football cities such as London, Glasgow and Munich, but also some less well-known locations such as Oslo, Bologna and Bruges. What results is an inspirational book, a cross between a football stadium guide, a city travel book and a personal diary, in which Simon’s passion for the game and his desire to make the most of each unique location come through in his own personal writing style.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Austin Macauley Publishers
• Release date: Feb 28, 2022
• ISBN: 9781398417908

Simon Pask

Simon Pask grew up in Faversham, Kent, with sports—particularly football—always a huge part of his life. Having later spent time living in the Midlands and in Ireland, he moved with his family to the Netherlands in 2014. Aside from writing, Simon’s ‘day job’ is heading up the European finance team of an international travel business based in Amsterdam, where he has worked for the past thirteen years.

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About the Author

Simon Pask grew up in Faversham, Kent, with sports—particularly football—always a huge part of his life. Having later spent time living in the Midlands and in Ireland, he moved with his family to the Netherlands in 2014. Aside from writing, Simon’s ‘day job’ is heading up the European finance team of an international travel business based in Amsterdam, where he has worked for the past thirteen years.

Copyright Information ©

Simon Pask 2022

The right of Simon Pask to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by the author in accordance with section 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.

Any person who commits any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

All of the events in this memoir are true to the best of author’s memory. The views expressed in this memoir are solely those of the author.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

ISBN 9781398417892 (Paperback)

ISBN 9781398417908 (ePub e-book)

www.austinmacauley.com

First Published 2022

Austin Macauley Publishers Ltd®

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E14 5AA

Acknowledgement

There is not much in life that you can truly say that you do totally on your own. This book is no exception. The idea for it was born in my favourite Greek restaurant, Dimitra, in Woerden, Netherlands, in January 2019. My wife, Tricia, gave me the confidence to pursue the idea, and within days, I had drawn up a plan for the cities to be included and rough timescale for completion of the book. It has been around 15 months in the making. I have changed my mind on a lot of things, both in terms of content and layout, as the months have gone by, but have tried at all times to keep the book personal to the experiences I have had, which is why you will not necessarily find all the cities and clubs that you might expect in a ‘stadium guide’ or a ‘city guide’. I have Tricia to thank for her reading of all draft chapters as the cities in various countries were completed, and for ensuring that I kept coming back to the personal element. We both have fulltime jobs and when she has not been able to travel with me to a particular city, her enthusiasm has not reduced and she has read through the drafts for those places over and over with as much interest as she did for the cities and grounds that she did visit. I have always been very happy going to matches on my own, but it is always better if she is with me.

Thanks also to our daughter, Eve, for keeping the hundreds of photos of my travels safe in the electronic world that I sometimes fear. It was lovely working together with her and hopefully her knowledge of football and European geography has improved as a result of our little chats. Judging by her improved performances in the many quizzes that we have at home, I think that is the case.

I also appreciate the time that my lifelong friend, Neil, has put into reading the drafts and for his excellent proofreading skills. He has also made suggestions for improvements to the content from a football fan’s point of view, all of which have been welcomed.

I have visited the cities and matches included here with a few different people, and I thank all of them for their company and for making each trip truly unique.

My confidence in preparing the book was boosted by having a couple of articles published in the excellent monthly magazine Football Weekends. So, what you read in the pages that follow about The Hague in The Netherlands and Oslo in Norway are reproduced with the kind permission of Jim Stewart and his team.

Last, and certainly not least, my thanks go to everyone in the team at the Austin Macauley Publishers, who have shown faith in the project and have made my dream of seeing this book in print come true.

So, my thanks go to everybody who has contributed in any way in the making of this book. I couldn’t have done it without you.

Introduction

My first memory of football was as an eight-year-old, watching the 1970 FA Cup Final between Chelsea and Leeds United. With my sister, Alison, randomly choosing Leeds as her favourite, I automatically went for the other team. A scrappy 2-2 draw on a disgrace of a pitch at Wembley was followed by a physically brutal replay at Old Trafford, which Chelsea eventually won 2-1 in extra time. And the rest, as they say, is history. Chelsea was going to be my team forever. I couldn’t have told you anything else about football at that time. I didn’t know that Everton had just won the league or that the night before Chelsea’s replay Arsenal had won the Inter Cities Fairs Cup against Anderlecht. I might have known that there was a World Cup approaching that summer because you were able to collect cheap coins with badly designed players’ faces on when you bought petrol at Esso. I swear it was impossible to tell the difference between Gordon Banks, Bobby Charlton and Alan Ball on those coins, but it was still exciting every time Dad went to fill up to see who you got. Live matches on TV were very rare then and Match of the Day on a Saturday night, if you were allowed to stay up and watch it, and The Big Match on a Sunday afternoon, each showed only two or three matches. So, opportunities to see your own team were limited. Most information was gleaned by listening to the radio, reading newspapers (starting with the back page) and the weekly Saturday morning thrill of going down to the newsagents with your pocket money to buy Shoot! or some other football magazine.

It would be another ten years before I made by first trip to Stamford Bridge with a Burnley-mad school friend to witness a 2-1 win over his team, and I was then hooked on live football and wanted to go every week. I could reel off (but won’t) the details of the first few matches that I went to; the scores, scorers, what was going on in my life at the time – the lot. The fortunes of Chelsea have recovered in recent years, but I think I’m entitled to call myself a ‘loyal supporter’, having witnessed the depths of despair suffered by all Chelsea fans in the late seventies and early eighties. For example, there were only another 13,107 fans there with me the night that a Bob Lee own goal and second by Clive Walker ensured a 2-0 midweek win over Bristol Rovers in the old Second Division in October 1980. Two months later, I sat (or probably stood in those days) through an absolutely dire 0-0 draw with John Toshack’s Swansea. Over the years, I’ve seen defeats against Tranmere and Oldham, and penalty shoot-out failures in the League Cup against Burnley and Charlton. I really do feel like I’ve earned the right to the recent success.

As the years went by, I also developed a love of travel. I have always enjoyed the thrill of visiting a new country and I prefer what you might call sightseeing holidays to beach holidays. So, what could be better than combining the two? To travel and watch football? Even if I travel in summer, it doesn’t hurt to do the odd stadium tour if the football season hasn’t started yet, does it?

I used to travel a bit to Mexico City for work. On my first visit, my only thought was to visit the Estadio Azteca. A couple of months after that 1970 FA Cup Final, England did indeed go to Mexico to defend the World Cup they had won at Wembley four years earlier. But their 3-2 quarter-final loss to Germany not only meant that they were not going to retain the Jules Rimet trophy, but it also meant the start of a bit of a trend for years to come, being knocked out by our Teutonic friends. The World Cup Final that year, in said Azteca, was one of the classic matches of all time. Brazil 4 Italy 1. Brazil’s fourth goal by Carlos Alberto (you know the one I mean) is still my favourite goal ever. Kenneth Wolstenholme’s commentary describing it as ‘sheer delightful football’, for me, is not far behind his official number one classic commentary line from the 1966 Final. Sorry, let me correct myself, that is my favourite non-Chelsea goal ever! As a child, watching those grainy pictures on TV, Mexico seemed like a million miles away and a country that I never had any hope of ever visiting. In November 2009, when I knew that I was making my first trip to the country, the Azteca immediately became part of my plan for the week. Just seeing the road signs to the ground from the back seat of the taxi was exciting and standing outside looking at the walls of the massive stadium was…well…I can’t really explain. It was amazing. A tour inside the stadium followed, accompanied by the ongoing thought as to whether I was standing on the same piece of ground that Pele or Jairzinho might once have stood.

It’s a strange thing then, that I had never seriously considered going to a World Cup or European Championships myself before 2014. Maybe I thought it would be tricky to get tickets or it would be difficult to get there, even though there had been plenty of tournaments close to, or even at, home in my adult life. So, World Cups in Spain ‘82, Italia ’90, France ’98 and Germany ’06 all passed by with me stuck on the sofa watching on TV. And even Euro ’96 in England…why didn’t I go to see any of those matches? But when Brazil was announced as the venue for the 2014 World Cup, I felt like I just had to give it a go. The chance of seeing a World Cup match in Brazil would surely be a dream come true. As it turned out, what seemed like an age after submitting my ticket application to FIFA, I was successful in getting tickets for two matches at the iconic Maracanã in Rio de Janeiro. Another long wait then followed before the draw for the tournament was made and I knew who I was going to see play in what until then had just been known as match 19 and match 32. Eventually, I had the privilege of seeing Chile (and their brilliantly noisy fans) dump reigning champion Spain out of the tournament with a 2-0 win, and then a few days later, saw Belgium squeeze past Russia with a single late goal. The trip included watching other matches on the massive screens on Copacabana beach (well, someone had to do it) and climbing Sugarloaf Mountain. All the time, there were replica ’Brasil’ shirts (90% of which were Neymar Jr) everywhere. Matches at Euro ’16 in France and at the 2018 World Cup in Russia have followed and I now look forward to a trip into the unknown to Qatar in 2022.

I guess the purpose of this book is firstly to share some of my experiences at grounds and cities around Europe with you, and to let you know that it is possible to go to see the match, the club, the city or the ground of your dreams. It really is possible. Obviously, some cities are more accessible than others and some matches are easier to get tickets for than others. For me, a lot of the fun is in the planning: consulting the fixture lists and seeing if you can combine a Friday night match in The Netherlands with a Saturday afternoon in Germany, for example, and looking at what combination of planes, trains and automobiles are going to get you to and from your chosen destinations at the right times. Generally, I am a very much a three o’clock on a Saturday or 7:45 pm on a Wednesday type of traditional football fan, but I accept that football is now 24/7. I do still find it difficult to build up to a match in the same way for a 11:30 am on a Sunday or 6 pm on a Thursday kick off. Looking at it positively, though, these varying kick-off times does allow for multi-match weekends and there are a couple in the pages that follow that would not have been possible without the rescheduling assistance of our friends at Sky Sports and BT Sport.

In a book such as this, I can only give a taster of what the cities are like and your choice of what to do to combine with the football may be completely different to mine. Also included are some tips to try to take some potential worry out of travelling in certain countries. For those of you who have already done a bit of football travelling, I hope that there are some ideas in here to inspire you to travel to new cities and maybe witness a new league. Whatever your reason for reading this book, I hope that you find the book itself interesting and that it does inspire you to visit a city and watch a match somewhere that you have not been to before. Enjoy!

Chapter 1

England, Scotland and Ireland

Faversham and Gillingham

My first football ‘city’ was the small market town of Faversham in Kent. After watching that 1970 Cup Final and trying to watch every possible live match on television, I sought out my local team, Faversham Town in the Kent League. From our home in St Catherine’s Drive it was a short walk through the ‘rat patch’ (don’t even ask) to the London Road and only a further couple of minutes to the Salters Lane ground that has been Faversham’s home ground forever. My memories of my visits there are sketchy and have not been helped by the usual online sources, which appear to stop short of that level of non-league football. What I do remember is standing behind the goal at the Salters Lane end for a top of the table clash against Maidstone United, probably in 1971 or 1972 and seeing at first hand the late winning goal by Alan Fowler that gave the Lilywhites a narrow 1-0 win. If my memory serves me right, the crowd was a mammoth 600 or so, quite unheard of for Faversham at the time. I also remember being given an extra 5p by my Mum on top of the entrance fee, which was maybe 15 or 20p, so that I could buy a Club biscuit at the shop at halftime, each time I went there. Funny what sticks in your head. My only other clear memory is coming away from a match (I don’t know who Faversham were playing) on my tenth birthday, listening to the radio to hear the scores from the FA Cup 5th round. Chelsea were away to Orient. The sensational news (the announcer’s words, not mine) came in that Chelsea had lost 3-2.

Second Division Orient had knocked Chelsea out of the FA Cup. On my birthday as well. I can’t remember if I cried. If I did, I probably wouldn’t admit it.

My first step up from the Kent League was to watch Gillingham in the old Third Division. I’ve always remembered that my first match there was a 0-2 home defeat to Plymouth Argyle, but without the help of the excellent website 11v11.com, I would not have been able to recall that it was in March 1971.

Gillingham was an easy 20-minute train journey from Faversham and then no more than a 10-minute walk from the station to Priestfield Stadium. I visited a good few times in the seventies. A highlight was when Sheffield United visited in 1978 with their recently recruited Argentinian Alex Sabella. Ossie Ardiles and Ricky Villa had already signed for Spurs after the 1978 World Cup and the signing of Sabella was Sheffield United’s attempt to get on the international bandwagon. On that particular day in north Kent, Gillingham ran out comfortable 3-0 winners. On that day specifically, and in his career in England generally, Sabella never really reached the heights, even at club level, of his South American colleagues.

I still see the floodlights of the Priestfield Stadium every time I travel on the train from London back to Faversham and still pass the tiny stands of Faversham Town each time I go along the London Road in my