England Andorra

I made it to the game with literally seconds to spare. The flight from Bournemouth to Girona left and arrived on time on Wednesday and I was met as arranged at the airport for the 90km journey to the Olympic Stadium in Barcelona. The rain was falling steadily and my driver indicated there was little hope of getting to the ground by the 9pm kick off (local time). Being pretty much the remnants of rush hour didn't help either nor did the message I received telling me there would be no admittance after the game started.

There wasn't much else to do than chat which was easy as the driver was usually a tour guide and she was able to give me the lowdown on the local attractions and Spanish history. Fortunately the traffic in the city was quite light and I was dropped off with 10 minutes to kick off. More fortunately still I was almost right next to the right entrance and on pushing through with the rest of the latecomers I found myself with the school party immediately having just missed the national anthems (which was good as I didn't fancy doing the God Save the Queen.

I was able to join in with some of the songs though. The first half was dire and it was great to sing along to what a load of rubbish although I didn't say anything about second choice Steve as he seems to helping England achieve exactly what I'd like them to. He got a huge amount of abuse and the 40 schoolchildren with us were given an education in just about every swear word imaginable set to song!

I got the impression some of them would have rather have had a detention than watch the game but it did improve in the second half. Gerrard took his goals well but Ferdinand was awful throughout as was Ashley Cole. I can't really say I've seen Rooney play as he was anonymous.

We manged to get locked in after the game as we waited for the stadium to empty. It's funny how inaccurate crowd figures are when guessed at. I was told there were 40000 fans there! Turns out there were 12000.

Nice to have seen an international (it does qualify as such I believe) and the atmosphere was pretty good. I'm pleased to say I didn't celebrate any goals and didn't have to listen to too many songs linked to the second world war or anti Irish. The funniest was 'we want 2' against mighty Andorra.