Stumped by vicious Vikings

WE were motoring nicely, six teams down in three days in our happy experiment to see all 32 nations and then... yesterday.

Our first failure. The wheels haven’t quite come off the bus yet, but Joxer’s Hiace has, it must be said, coughed and spluttered to a standstill on the autobahn.

I arrived in Berlin after an uncomfortable eight-hour train journey from Munich and despite deciding to shimmy past Nuremburg and the English thousands, my trial was still ahead of me.

My fanciful notion of a night-train as something from an Agatha Christie book was cruelly shattered. The uber-modern carriages didn’t boast one lighted candle nor any murder and/or mystery at all. And they charged me €80, plus the €5 I lost in a game of cards with my three Angolan travelling companions. I don’t even know what game we were playing.

We slept fitfully; me head to head with Marcel. Him dreaming of an Angolan victory, me press passes and laptop computers, and after what seemed like three weeks, we arrived at 7.30am to be met by the Viking hoard.

Thousands and thousands of colourful bedecked Swedes congregated around the main train station, even more flooding into the city in camper vans and cars while more still were ferried to the action by plane. The vast majority, it seemed, were ticketless and, I have to say, no craic at all.

When I compile a list at the end of this tournament of who was a bit of fun and who not, the Swedes will be lucky not to be near the bottom. “Well lads, I hope the last one out turned off the lights in Stockholm, ha?” Blank, blondy faces. I left them, promising to return, only cleaner.

Berlin is a vast city with one of the most sophisticated yet complicated public transport systems I’ve encountered. With the journey from Bavaria to Berlin taking all night, the trip to my hostel nearly proved as much an ordeal. I understandably fell asleep, despite missing Marcel, as soon as I got on the underground train and woke up somewhere on the outskirts of Prague. I then boarded another wrong train before, on the brink of a nervous breakdown, I made it across town to my €20 a night youth hostel. I was stranded in a town called Spandau for a while, during this bleak time, by the way. Spandau Ballet’s ‘Through the Barricades’ was a huge hit in this country just after the Berlin Wall fell. It could be the theme tune to this trip if it wasn’t Spandau Ballet. And rubbish.

Annihilating the communal box of sugar puffs in the jugendherberghe, making several young Scandanavians girls weep, I set myself up nicely for the day. Then revisiting the breakfast table, which I shouldn’t have been anywhere near in the first place, I made nice little cheese rolls for my lunch. Ticket money to play with is a mere €50 but I’m optimistic, foolishly at this stage.

My morning was spent in Berlin’s Hauptbahnhof, the main station, with a crudely-made sign hanging from my neck. “Ich suchte eine karte bitte.” (I need a ticket please).

I might as well have been warning them of the Apocalypse. Despite wandering around the area for approximately an hour and a half, all I received was more sunburn and a few “fawk affs”. As the day wore on though, it did seem like a stupid request.

At the Olympic stadium, which was impressive but quaint compared to the Allianz Arena, hundreds more Swedes congregated to snaffle up any remaining tickets. Touts, which were oddly few and far between, were asking €500 for one and hospitality tickets were starting at a thousand. I was offered once of these hospitality packages in Munich for €150 the day before and having snuck in to the VIP area in Kaiserslautern for a look, it seems to be worth the outlay.

Guests are wined and dined as well as enjoying excellent seats. Lots of the hospitality passes I’ve seen have commercial companies’ names on them and one I noticed was a very well known and respected high street trader. It seems FIFA’s distribution policy for this tournament has been a farce, with the real fans once again the victims.

When one Swede paid €1,000 cash to see his country play, I decided it was once again time to change tack and head back into the city but for the second time in a day my meandering did not pay dividends. Every tout I rang (I now have a collection of numbers) was met with guffaws while any local hawkers were planning on retiring on their tickets.

Nevertheless, we’re back on the main road today and, I’m certain, back on the track to reaching our ambitious goal — we’ll just have to catch up with Sweden and Paraguay.