Adrian Russell » Travel

Guess who’s going on holidays?

Adrian — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 16:57:38 +0000

I’m out of here for two weeks.

A couple of columns and other posts will pop up in the meantime so check back, or add a subscription or whatever.

In the meantime, check out the Irish Examiner sportsdesk blog here.

This time next year, Rodney…

Adrian — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 11:30:32 +0000

Trap’s Irish squad fly out to Bulgaria today for the next step along the path to South Africa – hopefully. A draw or -whisper it – a victory brings the dream a little closer – the hope that this time next year an emerald tide will flood Jo’Burg and Cape Town and elsewhere to follow, once again, the Boys in Green at a World Cup.

It will of course follow the pattern of The Boys in Green qualifying for tournaments that require fans to re-mortgage their homes to get to. I was at the last Weltmeister, which was a little closer, in Germany in ’06.

It was an attempt to see each team – all 32 nations – on a budget of €150 per day. So that was including tickets, accomodation, food, etc. With hilarious and long-term consequences.

The piece below is from a time when the optimism and self-respect of the first round had just faded; I had already started collecting the plastic drink cups people left in the stands so I could claim the €1 refund, but had yet to steal gin from that homeless man in Frankfurt.

I lost my phone and with it all my photos on the second last night in Hamburg after an Italy game so the only graphic I could upload, apart from Il Trap, is the official form the German police made me sign in a Hannover interview room one morning. Instead reader, let me paint you a word picture! I offer you a three-year old article which was punched, with another deadline about to again disappear over the horizon, into an internet phone in Nuremburg’s Hauptmanhof one Sunday three years ago:

With the commencement of the second round or “the one-eighths” as some supporters here call it, the tempo, heat and ticket prices have been crudely hoofed skywards. Have it! On Saturday in Leipzig, the nipple tasseled, samba dancing circus that was Argentina versus Mexico roared into town on an ostentatious bandwagon.

The Latin American carnival flooded the entire city centre, with impromptu street parties chasing each other up and down narrow streets that look like the set for a clichéd cold war movie.

It was against the backdrop of this old city, brimming with all its tangible and impressive reminders of a communist past that a corrupted capitalism yesterday thrived. While last week we notched up several matches on the rocky road to seeing all 32 teams within the budget of €150, this was to prove a whole new ball game.

Immediately one realised that even finding anyone with a spare was going to need all the spy school skills of Ethan Hunt. Touts were few and far between, plenty having already sold on earlier to suck every last dollar or yen out of their gullible clients. This seemed, if you’ll forgive me, like a mission improbable.

Prices of €700 and upwards were quoted and paid happily right up until kick off, particularly by neutrals eager to catch a game. That fact that it was a Saturday and the sun was in the sky only encouraged the touts to make hay while it shone.

One frank exchange of views took place between myself and a helpful Cockney gentleman, as our synchronized watches ticked noisily. Me: “how ´much?” Tout: “a pha-sond”. “A thousand?” (walking away and wearing my incredulous mask). “How much d`you wanna pay, then?” “One hundred euro please”, I replied cheerily, pulling my money from my secret hiding place in my shoe. “Listen you Mick, you’ll end up sucking your facking potatoes through a facking straw if you waste my time again.” No deal then?

As kick-off time came and went this became a battle of nerve, who’d crack first? There was a group of lads, not unlike me, with limited resources who were trying to beat the banker too. Like Paul McGrath trying to marshal his back four, I held the line. We didn’t blink. The stock of the tickets in the touts’ greasy pockets plummeted with every touch of the ball on the pitch behind us. They grow nervous; we might just pull this off.

But, not for the first time in my dalliances with the black-market, a posse of Japanese fans break ranks and push, literally, €500 notes into the hands of our opponents paying €2000 for three category two tickets. These means they were worth about €45 or €65 and they did so without any attempt at negotiations. It was like Phil Babb decided to Roberto Baggio onside while McGrath and the rest were stepping out at exactly the right moment.

The fans from the Orient then sprinted like mad men up the many steps to the home of Leipzig FC. Game over. But at least we came in under budget.

Sunday though was a new day. But the same tournament. I traveled to Nuremberg for yet more trials for another one eighth. The temperature was appropriately turned up, while the volume in the neat town centre was cranked to 11. The main street looked like a July 11 march but with the Orangemen on acid. Dutch fans bedecked in fluorescent and garish team colours vastly outnumbered their Portuguese opponents who sashayed fashionably in purple up down the throbbing boulevard.

There were certainly tickets around and the prices were a lot more Euro trash than Rip off Republic but with accommodation costs and travel picking €50 from our pockets before we even asked the touts to dance, this was going to be a very short date.

Despite stalking the pretty ones with tickets, taking rejection with a little chuckle and just asking the next one standing against the school hall wall, I was to have a lonely night again. Luis and Arjen boogied without me but there’ll be other nights and other dances.

This piece first appeared in the Irish Examiner, sometime in June 2006.

Hitchhikers guide to the GAA-laxy

Adrian — Thu, 28 May 2009 11:54:16 +0000

The GAA summer was still-born last weekend but this Sunday, as Cork meet Tipp in Thurles in the Munster senior hurling championship, the season will be very much alive and kicking.

Last summer as part of the Irish Examiner’s monday championship supplement, as the recesson began to bite I tried to guage how cheap one could get to Croke Park for a big game.

I planned to hitch from Kerry to the capital. Wearing a Cork jersey.

Ask a New York cabbie, “How do I get to Carnegie Hall?” and they’ll invariably tell you “practice, practice, practice”. With my collar pulled above the nape of my neck to shield myself from a sheet of the wettest Kerry rain, as I shuffled along the road between Killarney and Tralee before 8am on Saturday morning, I realised getting to Croke Park was a journey not dissimilar. But it’s more a case of thumb, thumb, thumb.

It started out as a journalistic experiment to gauge – as ‘The Recession’ casts a long shadow over our depressing summer – how cheaply one could get to Croke Park and take in one of the ever-present highlights of the season – the championship action.

And in doing so I was to cross the border from Cork, under cover of darkness, and join the Kerry fans’ wending their way to Dublin, and perhaps unravel one of the Association’s great mysteries – if it is a mystery – why Kerry supporters don’t travel before September. Like St Patrick crossing the Irish Sea to convert the masses, a Corkman, perhaps, needed to show his neighbours the way to Croker. Letters to sport@examiner.ie.

I was to do this by reeling in the years, to a day when the Celtic Tiger was but a cub and people stopped along the road to offer much-needed lifts to those thumbing on the highways and byways of our little country. I was to achieve this though, deep behind enemy lines in the Kingdom, on the day their footballers played a much-anticipated All-Ireland quarter final against Galway in HQ, while wearing a Cork jersey.

I quickly realised a day I thought might resemble a particularly interesting episode of O’Gorman’s People mixed with Up for the Match, was about to descend into what No Frontiers might look like, if Kathryn Thomas developed a crippling crystal meth addiction amid the Indian sub-continent’s most violent monsoon. It was to be the longest day, and I’m certain no one coming out of Kerry – not Gooch, Donaghy, no one – worked harder than me to get to Croke Park on Saturday.

A national radio station last week heralded the death of the hitch hiker in Ireland, insisting the practice is extinct – partly, perhaps, thanks to our new-found wealth and busy lives etc. Certainly, my teenage sister, when told what I was undertaking, was confused as to what exactly we were talking about. “Hitch? Hiking?” Thumbing a lift is not on her radar.

Presumably she thought the ribbon of scruffy looking youngsters, she may or may not have noticed down the years, who dot the nation’s road network with their thumbs cocked, were just congratulating my father on his impressive driving.

The radio station’s argument became all too real to me on Saturday morning. Walking from Killarney, out the road towards the county’s biggest town, I was passed by car after flash car. Some drivers offered half-apologetic shrugs, one a heart-felt two-finger salute, more still just ignored the idiot in the Rebels’ 1984 jersey. Money spent: cup of tea and breakfast bap: €6.50

Like a child on the night before a school test he hasn’t prepared for, promising to study if it just snows during the night; I vowed I’d pick up any old vagrant waving a sign for Rosslare in the future, if I just managed to get in next to someone’s car heater for a while.

Eventually – and after, in fairness, just am hour of feeling like the ignored wallflower at the parish disco – the glorious flash of an indicator signalled acceptance at last and I skipped giddily after the stopping van.

The driver was a Romanian man, living in Killarney for the past few years, who seemed more preoccupied with the weather than even your average Irish native. He was going about his business delivering refrigerated goods around the county though he wished he was back at home, he admitted, on the ivory beaches. He knew the English for ‘topless’, but not, for instance, ‘war’. A lover; not a fighter, clearly.

He didn’t know anything about Kerry’s trip to Croker, but explained he hasn’t watched any Gaelic games since his arrival. He brought a TV receiver from home and watches Romanian channels only.

As we careered wildly towards the next leg of my journey, which I had suddenly found new enthusiasm for, he revealed an almost Tourettes-like habit of offering a little, sexist beep of his horn anytime we passed a perceived-attractive woman, accompanied by a sharp yelp – as if he was in pain.

When I enquired gently about this custom, and how it has gone down here, he admitted that he honked and hollered unconsciously on the way to bringing his pregnant wife for the scan in hospital recently; which provoked a loud and sustained attack.

My new friend kindly dropped me at the bus station – I didn’t have the heart to explain my complicated modus operandi – and continued with his working day.

After a 30-minute-or-so spell walking around the town, and then out towards Limerick – which seemed like the way I came, to be honest – I was happily picked up by a young lad on his way to look at a car for a friend in Limerick. An apprentice mechanic, he was full of chat, curious to know too why I didn’t get the bus.

Though grateful for the spin and glad he wasn’t an axe murderer, I would’ve almost taken my chances on the road again, after a few miles listening to the ridiculous dance music he obviously felt was ambient. When given the option to jump in Newcastle West, I bailed with thanks.

From the picturesque town, I happily scored a lift with a girl called Aine, who was happy to take me a lot of the way to Dublin. It was before noon still and I was confident of striding, like Phileas Fogg, entering Leicester Square, into a packed Croke Park to a standing ovation.

But as we edged through the throbbing traffic, I realised this would be tight. Outside Portlaoise we came to a complete and sudden standstill. After hours on the road – and having a good run at it – I was to be undone it seemed by an inconsiderable accident. Cars emptied, as Kerry jerseys filled the road, while more still pulled U-ies and rushed elsewhere. At last at 1.50pm we were ushered through the bottleneck.

The 2.06 train to Dublin from Portlaoise was now the target as no lift would get me to Drumcondra in two hours realistically, and that’s even if I got one at that stage. We made the train. Aine said she felt like Anneka Rice. I could’ve done with a helicopter. Money spent: €6.50 + €10 for train ticket = €16.50.

From here I thought it was easy: I folded myself into a seat and promptly fell asleep only to be awoken by my own snoring, to the face of two visibly upset children. But we had arrived. I shared a cab with a father and son from outside Tralee all the way to Croker. Money spent: 16.50 + 5 for taxi = 21.50

Picking up a ticket wasn’t as easy as envisaged. A wave of Armagh fans were washing out of the stadium, while their championship hopes were shattered. With them came a crest of tickets that looked fine but had already been scanned. So I bought one from the box office and took my seat. Money spent: €21.50 + €35 for ticket = €56.50

And what a game we were treated to. It made the slog worth it but, as we know, reaching the summit can be the easier part compared to the unglamorous descent. And so it proved, as every cloud that chased me all day, opened up directly above Hill 16, I think you’ll find, and unleashed hell. Jones’ Road flooded, taxis disappeared, buses were full. How was I to get home? €56.50 + €9 for hot dog and beer = €65.50

I waded through the city to Busáras to find there was no room at the inn; I made it to Connolly station to find the Luas stop is closed for the summer. Who knew? And when I ultimately made it to Heuston, I had no qualms about handing over the money for a train ticket.

Now I truly was behind enemy lines. I peeled off my soaked Blood and Bandages – everyone was stripping down – to the loudest cheer of the day. From there to Killarney again, it was banter all the way. But I’ve been invited back for the semi-final, where it’ll be same seats again apparently. Money spent: €65.60 + €33 = €98.60.

And so I made it back to base camp Killarney, having spent less than €100, feeling like Jack Kerouc’s Sal Paradise in On the Road as he sees the lights of San Francisco after bumming his way across the great American continent – all the way from the shadow of Carnegie Hall in Manhattan – to the rhythm of the beat generation. My day has been more green and gold, than gold spangled banner but thanks to a day on Ireland’s highways proves the Road to Croker is always full of incident and character.

Now is the summer of our discoteques

Adrian — Sat, 25 Apr 2009 01:28:36 +0000

I’m just back from covering the Cork City v Galway United game at Turner’s Cross. Around the corner, Musgrave Park was packed out for the Munster v Scarlets game. While it was the usual die hards who shuffled into the soccer game.

Maybe it’s time to follow baseball’s lead and have themed nights. Bring-your-boss night? Cowboys and Indians week? Rotten fruit: a funny ol game?

Here’s a selection of real promos from the States:

1. Disco Demolition Night
Disco-hating White Sox fans wrecked the Comiskey Park field when the Detroit Tigers visited Chicago, causing thousands of dollars in damages, as a “harmless” 1979 promotion created a near-riot and forced the Sox to forfeit the game. Believed to be the night the (disco) music died and it proved a costly 10c beer night. As the BeeGees sang: tragedy.

2. Hawaiian Night
The Phillies fill the area round their new ground with hula dancers, fans get traditional leis, and players posed in Hawaiian shirts for their scoreboard photos.

3. Mullet Night
The do that’s business in the front and party in the back, brings those same inclusive qualities to the ballpark. On Mullet Night, White Sox fans – again – wearing mullet wigs can parade around the ground while mullets are imposed on players’ scoreboard images. Here’s a fun fact, fact fans: a mullet is called a Bundesliga in the Czech Republic and it’s true, this promotion may not work in German soccer stadia.

“goin to rory’s, mam! txt u ltr!!:)”

Adrian — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 00:30:04 +0000

There’s a piece in today’s Irish Examiner about three 5th-year lads (two from Rathgar, one from Wicklow) who told their parents they were having a sleepover in one of their places.

But unlike everyone else who used that trick and went bushing/cow-tipping/ happy-slapping, these legends went to Italy for the Ireland game last week.

There’s some quailty quotes from the so-called ‘ringleader’.

We texted to say we were all having a good time and they never suspected anything. That’s the beauty of text messages. If they had rung us during the match they would have heard the crowd singing The Fields of Athenry.

They sound like they were more organized than me to be fair.

Spring Break!

Adrian — Sat, 04 Apr 2009 01:29:35 +0000

La Tifosi as the sides came out.

The teams’ big entrance.

The crowd during the national anthems

View from the cheap seats

Kevin, left, me, right, and the happiest man in Irish football. In a Polizei hat.

Kevin reviews the Corriere dello Sport a la James Richardson

I love it when a plan comes together…

Adrian — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 13:56:57 +0000

What. A. Fucking. Night.

Piece from today’s Examiner below.

YESTERDAY’s alcohol ban in central Bari, only lifted after last night’s match in the San Nicola Stadium, was about as futile and comical an exercise as one high-profile but uncapped League of Ireland player’s announcement of his retirement from international football a couple of seasons ago.

The estimated 6,000 plus Irish fans who clogged the arteries of the city on Tuesday night awoke yesterday with an Adriatic-sized hangover, hoarse throats and the realisation that a cure was not on the menu from our Italian hosts. But, as Groucho Marx famously stated, I don’t want to be a member of any club that will let me in anyway. Or, similarly, as one flag hanging in the Piazza yesterday explained: F**k the Recession, We’re on a Session. Indeed.

But there was plenty of beer to be bought from enterprising Italians on street corners, waiters were persuaded to wrap bottles of wine in tea towels while more hid cans behind upturned menus. And more still went to the beach.

Nell McCafferty once wrote about sleeping in the catacombs of Rome during Italia 90 where pasty, freckly Irish lads in O’Neill’s nicks and Saw Doctors t-shirts were bunking up, amazingly, with Scandinavian and Italian goddesses. Yesterday at the beach, the next tide of Celtic cubs were perched on white rocks like giant, green tortoises who are hard wired biologically to return to the same spot once in a lifetime to mate. There was certainly none of that. I, however, won an Italy jersey with a scratch card I procured for buying a bottle of beer. Result.

Speaking of results, it seemed to us last night’s was cast in stone. On Tuesday night a gypsy woman approached a group of al fresco imbibers outside a city centre cafe begging for cash. When she failed to extract any money she immediately gesticulated wildly and seemingly spat a few swears at us. Two Italian speakers in our company, however, explained that she had put a curse on Trap’s team and promised we’d lose 1-0.

The more superstitious amongst us jumped to their feet, rattled a few cents out of their pockets and offered it in exchange for a scoreless draw. It said a lot about the mood amongst the travelling support when no one even dared think mysticism would get us more than a point last night.

I’ve been here since Monday. I wake, stroke my now thick facial hair and just like Martin Sheen holed up in Saigon in the first scene of Apocalypse Now, think: Bari, I’m still in Bari. But many, many more arrived right up to yesterday afternoon using planes, trains and automobiles.

One group stumbled into the square at midnight on Tuesday when the party was in full swing. Entering, a civic space that was like the Cork hurlers’ homecoming in ‘66 with a generous dash of grappa, after a delayed flight from Rome one of their group told us of his travels around the south of Italy 19 years ago. He reminded me of the story of an old, sickly GAA club man who calls his son to his death bed and says: “Son I want you to know that I forgive those Rovers boys for the hiding they gave us in 1963 in the Junior B final… but don’t you ever forgive them.” He enjoyed his time but God, he was dying for a result last night.

The weather yesterday wasn’t conducive to a bucket and spades job on the beach and many of the bodies on show wouldn’t catch a wave in Youghal but needs must. This is where the action was — especially when the police confiscated the football that was kicked around in the main square when it was Garryowen-ed unceremoniously and hilariously onto the bonnet of their parked Paddywagon.

That was my cue to exit and was walking along the coastline looking for this famed Eldorado where — they whispered — you could still get Peroni, when in pulled a pimped-out SUV with two suave Italian lads with a Bryl Cream problem. In the back, hanging out the window was a lanky, bearded, middle-aged Dubliner in a flowing green, white and gold frock. He introduced himself as St Patrick, obviously. Forgetting everything I was ever taught about strange men in dresses offering lifts, we hopped in and to the famed beach. “Miracles happen when you believe in saints, lads,” he mumbled as he looked out, through his Ray Bans at the sudsy seascape, before taking a hearty pull of a Marlboro light. “Strange things happen,” he repeated.

Amen.

The touring congregation certainly needed religion and mysticism going into the San Nicola Stadium last night.

The Italian Job

Adrian — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 14:53:05 +0000

Few hours to kick off in Bari now; piece below from today’s Irish Examiner…

IAN RUSH couldn’t settle in Italy; the Welsh striker said it was like living in a foreign country. But San Nicola — the patron saint of Bari — is, they say, a friend to travellers and up to 6,000 Irish soccer fans were certainly making themselves at home in the coastal city yesterday.

Burly men in Shamrock Rovers polo shirts share bowls of creamy pasta like Lady and the Tramp sucking up the same piece of spaghetti; Waterford lads critique the Chianti while Peroni is the beer of choice. If we go any more native an Irish victory in the stadium named after the aforementioned saint (ironically, an away team has never actually won against Italy there) will see the Via Napoli clogged with thousands of Paddys in fashionable leather shoes and skin-tight tops, furiously beeping the horn of their stylish mopeds.

But as Gerry Adams might have remarked about the Boys in Green: they haven’t gone away you know. It’s like we never left Italy. The local paper splashes ‘Bentornati’ or ‘Welcome Back’ across its front page and many older soldiers in Trap’s Army look like they are still living in 1990.

Like those zealous Japanese soldiers oblivious for years to World War II ending, they appear as if they’ve been fighting on the Adriatic front ever since David O’Leary’s finest hour. Truly, a veritable battalion of mulleted-boasting middle-aged men in tight-fitting ‘Give it a Lash Jack’ t-shirts and Euro ‘88 Opel-emblazoned jerseys fill the wide avenues of this charming town. More still are wearing topical Brian Cowen nude portrait tops, admittedly.

One Irishman — part of a vocal delegation of workers from Dublin airport — provided the slightly scratched soundtrack to yesterday afternoon’s fun as he offered his party piece of Rhinestone Cowboy in a small but busy city centre cafe. In the shadow of the local castello, the setting was almost worthy of a spaghetti western. But not even Sergio Leone could direct this posse of bandits who are enjoying the cheap beer, good food and even the distraction of the FIFA World Cup trophy.

Yes, our world champion hosts have proudly put the magnificent trophy on display in the town hall for all to traipse in, camera phone hand extended to get an up-close-and-personal look at it. Like any hero from TV, it’s smaller in the flesh but hopefully, these fans and the FAI delegates who will be officially shown the cup today, will be reunited with it in South Africa next year.

The town authorities have laid on a major welcome — last night we were treated to a ‘music match’ between Italy and Ireland. Toto Schillaci was expected to sneak in and nick it in the end with a fluky banjo solo.

Dublin’s footballers are sick of waiting for their fans to finish one last scoop in a Drumcondra Road hostelry on championship Sundays; tonight the country’s footballers might be forced to kick their heels in the San Nicola Stadium as the ‘Ballymun in the Sun’ lads — and the rest of us — try to squeeze in a few extra minutes of paddling.

Hundreds are expected at a huge beach party before today’s match. This could get wet and/or wild. (Check out the YouTube footage of Scottish fans enjoying their day in the sun and sand on the same beach). But as Tony Soprano incredulously asked his son when he was suspended following a water-based school jape, ‘How can you vandalise a swimming pool?’

For fear of having to go into a witness protection programme after the next full stop, I’m whispering the word mafia, here deep in the Mezzogiorno. However, with the bespoke fan zone in the old quarter of this industrial city wallpapered in tricolours, one such flag yesterday depicted Il Trap with his name printed in the distinctive font of The Godfather movie posters.

The message is certainly clear. Cosa Nostra — this thing of ours — is going well. Trap is the talk of the town; taxi drivers offer a thumbs up, Juventus fans serving drinks mime their approval — everyone is pleased he’s here. Mr Trapattoni is no gangster clearly, but for the thousands in the Curva Sud of the stadium tonight, he’s the capo di tutti capi. And this mob mean business.

Together at last…

Adrian — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 15:21:39 +0000

Met this fella in Bari today.

On the road again…

Adrian — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 19:36:49 +0000

I’m off to Italy for Ireland’s qualifier with the Azzuri in Bari on Wednesday, via London for a couple of days thanks to Ryanair’s logistical Tourettes.

It may not be as good as a lion in a sidecar on a wall of death, see above greatest pic ever taken©, but it will be prettay, prettay close if we get, say, four points between Bulgaria and the Azzurri.

Jump the fence writes about the significance of the two games this week here.

I’ll blog away for the week and I’ll tweet the buildup and aftermath of the game and the match itself if i can get phone coverage in the stadium/cell/behind barricaded embassy gate. Goodbye readers. The two of ye can keep each other company for a bit.