SPORTING MOMENTS: Owen… St Etienne 1998

My first memorable sporting moment in this series was of a cricketing ilk. My second returns to more familiar territory but, as the rules state, is not Norwich City related.

Instead, it pertains to our national team, which back in the day I used to follow, mainly at home but, for one tournament only, away from Wembley.

England home games were ritualistic in the ’90s. Almost all of them.

• Meet in Halesworth in the morning.
• Travel to that London in either cars or a minibus.
• Stop en route at rip-off Little Chef on A12 and have rip-off Olympic breakfast.
• Drive to Wembley, park, and take Tube to central London.
• Always head to Punch & Judy in Covent Garden.
• Occasionally head The Argyle (opposite The Palladium).
• Partake of alcohol but not *too* much.
• Eat in or around Leicester Square.
• Head back to Wembley on Tube.
• Watch game.
• Struggle to find cars/minibus.
• Head home.

Nothing clever, pretty standard stuff. All creatures of habit. The only thing really noteworthy was that the group I attended these games with was predominantly made up of Ipswich supporters.

But I survived.

Which leads me nicely to my sole experience of travelling abroad to watch England.

It was the World Cup of 1998, which was conveniently in France, and so off five us went, via a hired Land Rover Discovery, a hovercraft, and some terrible map-reading (no satnavs in 1998, lads) that eventually took us to the South of France via the wrong side of Paris and a via brief stopover outside the Palace of Versailles. Yes really.

For a reason I can’t possibly explain, we eschewed the obvious Channel-crossing method of a Dover-Calais ferry for the less-obvious hovercraft crossing from Newhaven to Dieppe, which partly explains our detour to Versailles.

It was a mistake nevertheless. We opted to bypass Paris on the western front when clearly we should have opted for the eastern, but for those in our little party who hadn’t sampled the delights of Versailles, it was at least a glimpse of somewhere historical – not something you readily associate with a football trip abroad.

What I haven’t mentioned so far, but which ties in nicely with the Ipswich Town-heavy trips to Wembley, was the partisan split in our party of five…

• Ipswich Town supporters 2.5
• Norwich City supporters 2.0

Why the half? Well, because one mate was only half-hearted about it. He knows who he is and he knows I’m right 😀

Anyway… our destination was a campsite (a Eurocamp no less) in Vias, which Google informs me is “a commune in the Hérault department in the Occitanie region in southern France”.

Had I realised at the time it was officially a commune, it’d have felt much cooler than it actually did.

But regardless of what it was officially called, it was a long old poke. A ten-hour poke to be precise, and so it was dusk and beyond by the time we eventually arrived at our Eurocamp – long after the prescribed check-in time.

As luck would have it, our accommodation was actually pretty good – a six-berth stationary caravan that was infinitely more comfortable than we expected or warranted.

And that was home for the foreseeable.

By the time we arrived, England were already one game in. I had watched the 2-0 win over Tunisia in Oulton Broad’s The Lady of the Lake, which was nice, but for those of us heading over there was merely the aperitif.

But a small problem was looming. I say small…

We were booked to stay in said commune for 14 nights, which meant we were en France for England’s final two group games, their round-of-16 game and, at a push, their quarter-final (qualification permitting) but only had one ticket for one game between the five of us. And that game was for England’s third group game vs Columbia, which was taking place in Lens, Northern France – 590 miles away.

See what I mean?

We decided, regardless, to head to Toulouse for England’s second game on the premise there would be touts there willing to sell us tickets for extortionate prices.

Wrong. Well, right, but wrong in terms of the England fan-to-tout ratio.

Toulouse was jam-packed, and I mean jam-packed with England fans, most of whom seemed to be, like us, ticketless and on the lookout for a kindly tout (or local) willing to offer a ticket for just beyond face value.

It quickly became obvious that all five of us weren’t going to make the game, but what I will say is that Toulouse was peaceful that day – just noisy and very crowded. All helped by the fact there appeared to be very few Romanian fans around.

There was no obvious undercurrent that today tends to go hand-in-hand with England away trips. You know what I mean.

One of our number had the currency needed to negotiate with a tout – that ticket for the game in Lens – and another had more cash and persistence than the other three, and so managed to snaffle a ticket. So two us had tickets, three didn’t.

I was one of the three. And I was grumpy.

Even more so when it became clear that there were no big screens in what today would constitute a ‘fan park’ – only a series of marquees with TVs that wouldn’t look out of place in your 1990s living room.

As a result, we ended up not even watching the game; just listening to the oohs and aahs of those who had fought hard to catch a glimpse of 22 inches of England v Romania.

To further fuel my bad mood, England lost 2-1.

While the journey home wasn’t particularly long – 120ish miles – it was long enough when you’ve just spent a weird evening not watching England lose.

Four days later, it was the game in Lens vs Columbia. This time we opted to stay in our camp, watch it on TV and pray that England could get the win they needed to prolong their and our respective stays in France.

As it transpired, goals from Darren Anderton and David Beckham did the job, meaning they finished second in Group G and, as a result, would be heading to St Etienne for their round-of-16 game.

Vias to St Etienne = 190 miles.

Had they topped the group they would have been heading to Bordeaux.

Vias to Bordeaux = 258 miles.

So, although at the time I was fuming with Graham Le Saux for his cock-up that I didn’t see, which led to Romania’s late winner in Toulouse, he ended up saving those of us determined to get to a round-of-16 tie 68 miles worth of French autoroute travel.

You’ll have clocked by now that England’s opponents in St Etienne were Argentina.

Two of our party of five opted not to make the trek to the Loire Valley, but me and two Ipswich supporters – the same two who had made it into the Stadium de Toulouse – decided the off-chance of acquiring a ticket for an England/Argentina World Cup knockout game through dubious means was worth the gamble.

One thing I’ve neglected to mention, partly because it was so painful, is that less than a day into our stay in said Eurocamp, we met, purely by chance a father and son from Beccles who we knew who were also staying there. I say painful because both were also supporters of Ipswich and very proud of it.

But it was them with whom we travelled to St Etienne – a 4:1 ratio of hell.    

Unlike us, the Beccles contingent already had official tickets sought through the FA, and so first up, once in St Etienne, was to locate the ticket collection point, which was bizarrely located in a hotel waaaaay out of the centre of the city.

That was not to be the only oddity of the day.

Three of us were still sans ticket at this point and the bulk of England fans had, it seemed, yet to arrive in St Etienne, so it felt like a good time to start scouting around for a Stan Flashman.

I have no idea for how long we trawled the streets or how/why we ended up where we did, but seemingly from nowhere, on a deserted street well off the beaten track, we were approached by two ginormous blokes who were unmistakably American.

Not only did they have American accents, they also had an envelope full of tickets – three of which they were prepared to sell us for roughly the equivalent of £300 each.

Given it was so early in the day and as they knew there’d be no shortage of takers for their golden tickets, our attempts at haggling were almost futile. Equally, we knew that, despite clearly paying way over the odds, this may be our best and possibly only chance of getting some.

So the deal was done. Before lunchtime. With an evening kick-off.

You’re probably expecting me to say we spent the rest of the afternoon enjoying the hospitality of St Etienne in the company of many thousand fellow England fans and ended up barely remembering the game.

But you’d be wrong.

As odd as it seems, alcohol consumption that day was at the lower end of the scale. I can’t recall why. But what I do vividly recall is that the city was awash with Argentina supporters. Sky blue and white at every turn and massively outnumbering England fans.

I assumed it was down to us finding ourselves in an area congregated by Argentinians – who were, to be fair, peaceful if not overly engaging with the English – but once evening arrived and we were inside the Stade Geoffroy-Guichard, it became clear there were simply far more Argentinian supporters than English.

To say it was a 2:1 ratio is probably doing a disservice to those from the Argentine. And they were noisy, and still irked about ‘Las Malvinas’.

The calm of the St Etienne afternoon didn’t extend to inside the stadium in that early evening.

But we were in. Two of Stan F’s tickets were together and in a part of the stadium designated for locals; the other, a single ticket, was at the opposite end – both were surrounded by Argentinian supporters.

^{Yours truly was in the stand on the left, upper tier, halfway along, halfway up.}

It was a stadium of traditional appeal and was pleasingly of an ‘English’ style with four separate stands and no infilled corners. I suspect the Stade Geoffroy-Guichard of today is a very different beast.

The game itself was…. well, you know all about the game.

• 6 mins: 1-0 Argentina (Batistuta – pen).
• 10 mins: 1-1 (Shearer – pen).
• 16 mins: 2-1 England (Owen).
• 45+1 mins: 2-2 (Zanetti).

And there it stayed throughout the second half and extra time. A heroic effort by England, considering David Beckham was shown red in the 47th minute for that infamous leg flick on Diego Simeone.

Poor Diego. Pretty sure he carries the scars, mental and physical, of that ferocious assault to this very day.

For the record, one of the Ipswich mob wanted Beckham ‘thrown in the Tower’ for his indiscretion 😀

As we now know, it was to be another in a long line of glorious failures – Paul Ince and David Batty being the two to miss in the penalty shoot-out.

Twenty-five years on and the sight of those celebrating Argentinians is still far too vivid for comfort. So too the sound.

‘Marcha de las Malvinas’ rang around the stadium as we slinked out. It was the type of pain I’d only experienced first-hand while following City.

I didn’t expect it to hurt quite so much.

The return journey to Vias was grim. Even the usually chirpy Ipswich fans were silent (which in itself was no bad thing) but despite that very long drive home, a mild source of mirth awaited.

The two who didn’t make it to St Etienne – the other City fan and the 0.5 of an Ipswich follower – were absolutely hammered. Very good-natured, but absolutely slaughtered.

**Slurry voice**: “We’ve been drinking for our country”

And they had.

It took for the dust to settle and for the pain of defeat to subside a little to realise we’d witnessed something extraordinary – a game that would be remembered, for reasons good and bad, for a very long time and which contained one of the great individual England goals.

Equally, that feeling of emptiness that hits you when England invariably exits a tournament before its finale was amplified because we were out there. There were four days left for us to be all dressed up and with nowhere to go.

And so, on the day that could have included a trip to Marseille to watch England play the Netherlands in the quarterfinals, we headed home, this time heading south via the autoroutes in a Calais direction.

This time it was a ferry. This time we took the less scenic route, east of Paris.

Not since have I been to watch an England away game. And not since have I spent so much time in the company of Ipswich supporters.

One I regret. The other not so much. 😀