Around Euro 2024 – Day Nine – Dortmund

Day Nine – Saturday 22nd June 2024    
Portugal 3 Turkey 0
Dortmund Westfalenstadion - 6pm local time   

I’d used a shower squeegee borrowed from the bathroom of the studio flat we were staying in as an improvised windscreen wiper successfully on the way back from Gelsenkirchen, so went out to buy one on a sunny Saturday morning. On the short drive to an area with a home improvement store and a giant supermarket (the latter had one for five euro, the former some overpriced thing with a fixing for the wall), I noticed the windscreen crack spotted on my previous drive on Thursday morning was extending further across. So, I was also on the lookout for some kind of repair kit so that it wouldn’t worsen further. I did consider actually seeing if I could get the whole screen itself repaired short notice, but I am pretty sure I can get this done for a lot less back in the UK on my car insurance, and these things generally need booking in. Bloody complicated when you don’t speak the language and add to that our not being able to stay in one place for any extended period of time – in that the day is generally built around traveling to a match and we were departing Duisburg the following morning. 

I decided to go with a combination of a repair kit and faith in a higher power to get us through the trip. There was a prayer for no more heavy rain whilst driving and the weather seems to have picked up. It’s starting for feel a lot more like June for starters. I had to drive around a bit to find a parts shop that had what I needed, and the guy there sold me two kits – one for scratches and the other for individual cracks – for €40 total. I thought he was maybe selling me more than I needed to make money, but it turned out I could use both. I am catching up on these blogs, but writing one on Saturday went out of the window because of the time spent sourcing stuff to keep the car on the road and then applying the windscreen repair. It took a while with the time required for the stuff to be applied properly, but I used both of the kits, so if it holds out until I am back in London, it’s €40 well spent. I really do feel like we are now traveling on a wing and a prayer, but God knows, I’ve had enough scrapes driving abroad for football with both my own vehicles and rented ones. Gooner readers of a certain vintage might recall my having to abandon a Peugeot 504 estate car on the Belgian/German border back in 1991 en route to Austria Vienna v Arsenal in the European Cup. That was in the days I used the pen name ‘Doctor Robert’ for reasons I cannot remember.

 

33 years on, and back to 2024. Our game today was a 6pm kick off. The weather forecast was fine and Dortmund was an hour’s drive away. I worked out we could park four train stops from the stadium (at a place called Holzwickede) and catch train that took 15 minutes to reach the ground. The station was further away from the centre of Dortmund (a place I recall not worth spending time in) than the ground, so we wouldn’t have to face the huge crush of bodies that tends to occur on the trains to and from the centre. All well and good. We parked up and waited for our scheduled train at 4.36pm. What could go wrong? Just that the train was cancelled. It was the second day in a row where I have come to learn that German efficiency does not apply when it comes to public transport, a damn shame given UEFA’s insistence that we all use it. Fortunately, there was another one due at 5.06, which turned up late, and took more than 15 minutes to get to the stadium, but the main thing is that we built in enough time for unforeseen delays and were in our seats just before the teams came out. 

 

Turkey were always going to have a sizeable support in Germany, and at times, the noise they made was a match for a Borussia Dortmund home game. Fittingly, their official section was where the Yellow Wall forms for Bundesliga matches, although on this occasion, they were unable to lift their team. Portugal pretty much played them off the park, with the astonishing sight of Cristiano Ronaldo passing up shooting opportunities to pass to a coleague in a better position to score. He’s suddenly become a real team player, perhaps realising that’s his best way of hanging on for one more attempt at a World Cup. And of course, we had the four separate pitch invaders, every one headed for Ronaldo, with camera ready for a selfie with CR7. The first one was a kid, and it was kind of cute. He indulged the second one, but the third and fourth got short shrift. He was getting fed up, and so was everybody else.

 

There are plenty of stewards between the stands and the pitch, but the problem seemed to be that half of them were watching the game rather than the supporters. So, a defence as good as Scotland’s in the opening game. The issue is that one day, some nutter might be able to smuggle a small knife in and actually do something unthinkable. It does also appear as if matches with Ronaldo will need beefed up security, although perhaps it is a particular weakness of this stadium, I don’t know. It would be very difficult to invade the pitch in say Berlin, with a moat-like divide between the stands and the pitch. 

 

Anyway, the Turks should still make the last 16, and certainly will if they avoid defeat in their final match against the Czech Republic. I’m not anticipating Georgia beating Portugal. The latter are looking good, with players a level above most other teams in the competition. You could make an argument about peaking too early, but I can see them going all the way to the final. They might have left it late against the Czechs in their first game, but a look back at their results since the World Cup when they didn’t make it out of the group stage indicates they have transformed into a winning machine. 

 

As for the stadium, it’s an impressive place, holding 62,000 so only a little smaller than than Munich and Berlin. There is some excellent wall art of Dortmund legends besides the steps up to the entrances and the stands are all steep, with barriers in front of each row in the steeper upper tiers to prevent people falling forward. Given there is not a lot of leg room this is a necessity with the procession of people coming in and moving past bodies in a row to get to their seat. Doing this, my son kicked over someone’s beer so was obliged to give them the one he’d just bought.

Being allowed to take beers to the seats and drink them while watching the game is good, but my God, how sticky do the floors get as a result of spillage? I guess we see this at the Emirates with coke occasionally. At least water isn’t sticky, but most people out here are drinking beer or coke. The sheer amount of drinks means there is always going to be ones knocked over – it’s not like they have cinema style drink holders attached to each seat anywhere – although given the amount they are selling, it might be an idea. As for the amount of income made on beer, well at €7 a pop, not including the glass deposit, someone – presumably Bitburger, the official sponsors whose beer is the one served – are making an absolute killing from this tournament. One thing about European football fans – they love a drink. What a surprise.

We had time to kill before our train back to where we were parked, and after collecting our obligatory post-match plastic glasses for the deposit (not so many, people are wise to this now and there are a good number of them collecting as we are) we ambled our way out. A solo beer seller begged us to buy her final beers – two and a half of them – for the price of 10 euros. Doing the maths, we could get 3 euros back per glass, so it was a good deal. Mind you, my son drank most of them because I would be driving in less than an hour. His appetite for food and beer knows no bounds. 

 

The Belgium v Romania game kicked off whilst we were on the platform waiting for our train from the stadium. We were back in our accommodation in Duisburg before it ended, in time to see De Bruyne strike Belgium’s second. With everybody on three points in that group now, it makes our final ‘in the flesh’ match – Romania v Slovakia in Frankfurt – one with plenty at stake. This is a bonus given that frankly, this pairing did not look the most appetising on paper. Remember that I planned the trip around seeing a match in every stadium before the draw was made, and booked my car ferry and accommodation based upon this schedule. Doing 10 matches in 12 days is pretty good to cover the whole of Germany given we are getting around in an old Nissan Micra. It could have been done in 10 days with a private jet or the willingness to get up at 4am in the morning to cover daft distances, but I’m happy with the couple of days off. And only one of those off days did not involve driving a fair distance. Dortmund was the final game of four in the western region so remaining are three more further south before we head back home in time to watch the knockout stages in the comfort of home, in front of the TV, not somewhere I have to drive to! 

 

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