There are times when the Gods truly smile on you, eg. TJ Slovan Varnsdorf versus Viktoria Zizkov at the weekend, thus triggering a ten minute bus trip through forest to the former German enclave to watch my adopted Czech team: Zizkov, beside whose ramshackle stadium I used to live and crumbling terraces I stood on.
Varnsdorf's stadium is downhill from the bus station. Turn right at Rudolf III's pub, past the Nas Chleb bakery, past the boarded up fanshop shack and down a grassy, muddy slope for a pitchside view. Entrance was free as I'd got there so late and equally as impressive was the girl at the turnstile, reading a book due to a shortage of fans to sell tickets to. The day's attendance was made up of 520 hardy souls.
For match highlights click HERE.
For match highlights click HERE.
Equating the Zizkov team that I knew in the 1990s to the team on the pitch in front of me was proving difficult and I lost myself in melancholic reverie of Sunday mornings in Praha 3, back in the day ... until an icy blast of winter wind and a splattering of beer foam to the face brought me back to the present as I went for a half-time hot dog, passing a Zizkov fan in bright red kilt while AC/DC's Highway to Hell rang out, followed by the theme tune to Friends as tribute to one of the show's actors who had died.
The match was a scrappy affair with lots of goals, lots of fouls and lots of players limping in pain or being stretchered off by grinning medics. Hell and damnation! Zizkov were stuffed 4-2 and now languish mid-table, but I was still pleased to have seen this new generation lumber around the field, shrieking 'ty vole' and 'kurva' against a backdrop of hills rolling up and over the border into Germany's Saxony state.
The match was a scrappy affair with lots of goals, lots of fouls and lots of players limping in pain or being stretchered off by grinning medics. Hell and damnation! Zizkov were stuffed 4-2 and now languish mid-table, but I was still pleased to have seen this new generation lumber around the field, shrieking 'ty vole' and 'kurva' against a backdrop of hills rolling up and over the border into Germany's Saxony state.
One Zizkov fan was far from happy when I photographed him in a group and he shouted out, asking me the reason for taking the photo.
'No particular reason, vole', I shouted back and on he moved.
There would be some irony in me scrapping with a fan of the team I support just because I'm standing on the other side of the fence in Varnsdorf taking a photo for posterity.
At the end of the game I bumped into Miloš who kindly gave me a lift back to Lipa where we went to the pub to discuss Zizkov's downfall.
'No particular reason, vole', I shouted back and on he moved.
There would be some irony in me scrapping with a fan of the team I support just because I'm standing on the other side of the fence in Varnsdorf taking a photo for posterity.
At the end of the game I bumped into Miloš who kindly gave me a lift back to Lipa where we went to the pub to discuss Zizkov's downfall.