FC Chornomorets Odessa

My new local team. The Ukrainian season resumes on February 28th with Chornomorets (currently third bottom with ten defeats out of sixteen) at home to sixth-placed Tavriya Simferopol.

The Ukrainian League is ranked seventh in Europe, ahead of Portugal and Holland, but that's mainly because of Donetsk and Kiev and "Odessa is non-league crap at its very worst," emailed a friend who's actually seen them play this season. He didn't go back. First rule of Eastern European football: lower your expectations - and spend as long as you can in the pub before kick-off.

Easter Road

Home of Hibernian Football Club, from the top of Calton Hill. Unless you're a Jambo, this is surely one of Edinburgh's greatest sights. Even the sea looks strangely enticing - doubly so if you're a Celtic fan this morning.

Grounds Without Games: All Around Lisbon

Using map one of the Lonely Planet's 1998 guide to Lisbon, a plastic compass and the kind of urban navigation skills that da Gama himself would've been proud of (well, as long as we agree to overlook that muddy, motorway deadend right at the start), I found my way from the Estádio da Luz - the original and still very much the best Stadium of Light in the world - across the northern suburbs to the Estadio Jose Alvalade XXI, home of Sporting Clube de Portugal (or Sporting Lisbon, as we English like to call them for short).





The two teams' rivalry extends to areas off the pitch too: Benfica (Metro stop: Colegio Militar) having an imperial-style eagle tacked above the main entrance, a statue of Eusebio where the stadium tours start, stands sponsored by Sagres beer and a discount electronics supermarket shielding it from the road. Sporting, on the other hand, had their ground tiled in the club colours of green and white (making it look a little like a public urinal), with their own multi-screen cinema, food court, health centre, Lidl supermarket and a clubshop in which everything cost precisely double what I was prepared to pay. Each of the stands were sponsored by a different company - Super Bock, not Sagres here. Let's hope the classless clowns currently running Newcastle United don't get wind of this branding opportunity, eh?


Whaddya mean it doesn't look like a football stadium?

Ground 114: Recreation Park, Alloa

A proper matchday experience: a pre-match pint watching the early game, a tenner in and a quid apiece for stovies and a Bovril, snow-streaked hills, swapping ends at half time so you can stand behind the goal your team's attacking - and exchanging concrete steps and a metal roof for grass and wooden risers, stamping your feet all second half to stop them icing over, a flukey late winner through a crowd of legs, straight into the bottom corner of the net.

The game itself was much more forgettable. Arbroath had been the better team until they had a man sent off, their passing neat and tidy but with no real threat. The home side huffed and puffed, their number nine running the channels willingly, but lacked the guile to break down a defence, the persistence to force an error. "That was not good," the bloke next to me put it at half time. I wasn't about to disagree.

Date: January 30th 2010



Ground 113, by the way, was a pre-season friendly at Stainton Park, home of Radcliffe Borough, where the hosts lost three-two to FC United of Manchester (July 27th, 2009). Two scuffs and a long-range shot, if memory serves me right.

Grounds Without Games: Inverness

A twenty-minute walk from the nearest pub, or a Rory Delap throw-in's distance from either the Moray Firth or the main road north, the Tulloch Caledonian Stadium is a neat and tidy ground built with all the loving care of an edge-of-town outlet shopping centre. The main stand has its back to the water, the clubshop is a portakabin, and the nearest buildings of any note are a scrapyard and a bathroom tile warehouse.

On the plus side, Terry Butcher was nowhere to be seen.

Ground 112: Kalevi staadionil

The crowd had built up to four or five dozen by the time I got to Kalevi Stadium. What passed for a ticket office was at the back of the single stand, one man with a purse and a table. He spoke no English so I handed over fifty crowns and waited for some change that never came. It's clearly an expensive division, the Estonian Esiliiga.

At kick-off the home team, Parnu JK Vaprus, were in third place, having won four, drawn two and lost three of their first nine games. Their opponents Valga FC Warrior, who represent a city on the Estonian-Latvian border but play all of their home games in Tallinn, were two places and two points behind. From the outset it was clear that Valga were by far the better team, with two pacy wingers stretching the cumbersome home defence. They took the lead after ten minutes, doubled it thirty seconds after the restart, then sat back and let Parnu hoof the ball aimlessly towards their corner flags, much to the disgust of the home support (though the two away fans seemed fairly happy about it all).



Date: May 10th 2009
Admission: 50 EEK

Ground 111: Arkādija, Riga

I only realised FS Metta and Valmiera were playing ten minutes before kick-off, and by the time I reached the stadium the visitors were one-nil up. There was an electronic scoreboard tacked to the fence on the far side of the pitch and the hundred or so spectators were all down one side, squinting into the sun from folding plastic seats. Directly across the road, Riga's Russian-speakers were commemorating the end of World War Two at the Victory Monument, the music almost but not quite drowning out the ten-year-old kid in front of me who insisted on banging on a drum and chanting "No! No! No!" whenever Valmiera attacked. Thankfully, that wasn't often.

Hoof it, hack it, head it seemed to be the limit of both teams' ability. What little skill there was came from Metta's left-winger, who looked like an 18-year-old Chris Waddle but had the pace of an 80-year-old Peter Beardsley. Nonetheless, he slammed home the equalising goal halfway through the second half, stumbling through a block challenege as the other visiting defenders helpfully cleared the area.

In the end a draw was a fair result.

Date: May 9th 2009
Admission: Free