Around Euro 2024 – Day Eight – Dusseldorf

Day Eight – Friday 21st June 2024    
Slovakia 1 Ukraine 2
Dusseldorf Arena – 3pm local time

The weather forecast for today’s match was not encouraging. Rain forecast, and given my lack of functional windscreen wipers (read the last couple of entries to catch up on that), I decided we’d have to suffer public transport to reach our afternoon game in Dusseldorf. The plan was to meet a reader of my blog, and past editorials on onlinegooner.com back in the day when I was editor, David, for a drink before the game. He lives in Dusseldorf, due to his German wife, and had made contact through a comment on a previous blog entry for this trip. 

 

This plan was foiled due to a number of delays. 1 – My son deciding to make a sandwich at the time I told him we were leaving. 2 – Our missing a bus as a consequence and having to wait 20 minutes for the next one. 3 – The train from Duisburg to Dussledorf being about 15 minutes late. 4 – The tram/train from Dusseldorf central station to the stadium not turning up for an eternity and then crawling to the ground. We made it in time for kick-off, but the drink with David had to wait until after the game. As an aside, the sandwich my son had made was not allowed entry to the stadium. Dumb rule that. You can’t bring your own food in, because… well, if you want to eat you have to pay the extortionate prices inside. Of course, this is the same pretty much everywhere, and sucks. With the wonderful exception of cricket. As for getting to the match on time, one thing I do build in with these things is time for delays. So, the aim is generally to get to the stadium an hour before kick-off, and a little too often, the reality is our getting to our seats 10 minutes before the game starts. 

Dusseldorf’s stadium has been compared, externally, to a giant warehouse, and I can see what they mean. It certainly doesn’t look like a football stadium, but it has a certain architectural fascination. I’m all in favour of something looking a bit different, and inside, you can’t argue with the views. Mind you, it’s a confusing layout. Not only did we have a lengthy walk to get into our side of the ground, but once inside, it wasn’t obvious where our block entrance was. The signage for the blocks didn’t really follow any logical sequence. In a sense this reflected Dusseldorf’s public transport system, which I found confusing as anything. More of that later. 

No matter, the game is the main thing and our seats were high up at the side, looking down at the end where all three goals were scored. The stakes were high for both sides. Win and Slovakia were guaranteed qualification. Ukraine play Belgium in their final group match, so going into that with anything less than a point would make their chances of progress into the knockouts extremely slim. And let’s face it, would they be more likely to beat Belgium than Romania? Things didn’t look great when they went a goal down, but it was a decent end to end game and they completed a comeback in what was a very even match with no shortage of chances. I’ll admit, this one didn’t look like a thriller on paper, but later that evening, we watched France 0 Netherlands 0, which turned out to be a far less entertaining affair, except for the controversy over the chalked-off goal.

 

We collected €30 worth of glasses post-match to trade in for the deposit money – fans are getting wiser to this now and there is growing competition to pick up those left behind. Then we met David for a drink – he’d cycled to the game. Fair play to him – and likely this was the most comfortable way of arriving, given the packed nature of the tram/train. He told us that cars had effectively been banned from the area, although somehow, I suspect that exceptions were made for the UEFA bigwigs and the corporates – even if they were bussed in. Arsene Wenger with David Dein were shown in attendence at the France match on TV later. If this pair didn’t arrive in a chauffeur driven car I would be astounded. Still, the rest of you lot can save the planet, eh? It was something I noticed at the car parking areas we walked through to get to the stadium at Gelsenkirchen the day before. A few vehicles and tons and tons of empty parking spaces. I guess it made for a quicker getaway for the privileged few.

 

We said our goodbyes to David after half an hour or so of football chat and headed for the station to catch the tram back into town. That moved at the pace of a snail, and we then got off on the wrong stop (guilty of following the crowd). The travel apps on my phone weren’t helping, so we just hopped on a train going back in the direction of the stadium, although it detoured and I realised from the electronic signage that we were inadvertently heading to Duisburg, which shows how close it is to Dusseldorf. My travel apps started making understandable suggestions at this point and we changed to a bus in Duisburg that got us back to our accommodation – the apartment where we were to spend the third of four nights. We arrived an hour before France and Holland kicked off, and it was a pleasure to get to sleep before midnight. 

 

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If you like this kind of thing, you can always revisit my Qatar 2022 blog entries - just search for 'Qatar 2022' in the labels