An Eejit Abroad

Sydney 2-0 Central Coast Mariners Att: 12,768 Awful first half in this A-League game but Sydney looked a lot better after the break and should really have won by more. Short-term covid era Aberdeen player Ryan Edmondson was the only SPFL connection in this one, I reckon. Really nice modern stadium though the pitch itself looks exactly what you’d expect of a surface that hosts three codes of football during the season. Decent atmosphere, particularly considering the place was more than half-empty, and CCM brought a decent away support. Great Northern is an underrated beer too - perfect for a warm NSW evening.

Manhattan Kickers 0-0 New York Ukrainians Att: ~30 First random game since the first day of the year as I managed to get along to a Cosmopolitan Soccer League game on Randalls Island in New York on one of those perfect days of weather you can get in NYC in the three weeks between the baltic winter and the horribly humid summer. The CSL has been running since the 1920s and was originally a league for German immigrants. It has expanded its scope since but is still mainly made up of teams founded by local immigrant communities, such as the NY Ukrainians who were formed just after WWII (Kickers aren’t one of those clubs as they were formed as a scouts team or something in the 70s). The standard tends to be decent enough although more professional and semi-professional teams playing in the NY metro area has diluted the quality a little at this level. Randalls Island is my least favourite of the CSL venues I’ve been to. It’s an absolute ballache to get to from anywhere in the city other than Harlem and the very upper Upper East Side and there’s really not a lot worth doing once you get there, unless you’re checking in to the rehab centre or doing firefighter training. The pitches are also all bunched together so half the game is spent kicking balls from other games off the pitch. But it’s still a pretty stunning setting, being on an island in the East River between the Bronx, Manhattan, and Queens and with the Triborough and Hell Gate bridges running above it. Game wasn’t great. My pictures are worse. Bonus Acela heading towards Boston for the train folks.

Queens Park Rangers 1-2 Cardiff City Att: 16,849 Flights home direct from Scotland were extortionate which gave me the opportunity to get to my first game of 2024 and tick off my sixth ground in London. A lovely old ground. Absolutely no leg room though which made for a less than comfortable watch. Poor atmosphere for the most part although Cardiff had brought a big away support. A boy down the front of my section had a sombrero, horn and old rattle which amusingly seemed to wind up the Cardiff fans. Lyndon Dykes was the single most obvious Scottish football link in this game as Rangers legend Aaron Ramsey was missing for Cardiff. A pretty poor standard overall and QPR are unsurprisingly looking like relegation candidates.

Tranent 0-1 Civil Service Strollers First time at Foresters Park in 13 years. A very well drilled Strollers side came away with the win after a second half penalty. A nice wee ground. First post-pandemic bovril for me too.

Genoa 1-1 Empoli Att: 31,797 Fascinating city, brilliant old dump of a ground, great atmosphere, decent enough game, wild boar twenty yards from the stadium. Good way to finish a big birthday year of overseas football I’ll likely never beat.

Monza 1-2 Juventus Att: 15,148 There are some good players in this Juventus team but on this showing they are anything but a good team. Having taken the lead in the first half they spent most of the second camped in their own box. Monza equalized in injury time before Juventus did show some mettle by getting a very late winner. Monza very much hard done by in this one. Bit of a strange environment with much of the non-curva home end full of Juventus fans. Did we give the local Juventus fans a bit of a hard time when Monza scored? Yes. Did that come back to haunt us almost immediately? Also yes. Another nice old town though and no sign of Berlusconi’s influence at all. Monza is only 15 minutes from Milan Centrale so very handy for anyone in town and looking for some football. The stadium is a very pleasant half hour walk from the train station.

Atalanta 1-1 Sporting Att: 14,865 Europa League tie in Bergamo. Both teams needed a draw to go through and after about an hour they decided that is what they were going to settle for. Decent enough game up until that point. Great atmosphere despite one end of the stadium being closed for renovation. The curva was in full flow and the 750 Sporting fans stuck in a temporary stand also made plenty of noise. There were plenty of them in town too and the ones we chatted to were pleasant. Bergamo is a lovely town and well worth a visit, even when hit with very Scottish weather as we were. Plenty of bars and restaurants and a great old town up the hill which you can reach by funicular. The Gewiss Stadium is also home to the best Burger King I’ve ever had - a fantastic Italian culinary experience.

Milan 1-0 Fiorentina Att: 73,074 Fiorentina should really have got something out of what was a very scrappy game. Francesco Camarda became the youngest player to ever play in Serie A when Milan brought him on during the second half. He was born in 2008… I’d previously wondered why there was talk of Inter and Milan moving out of such an iconic stadium. I don’t wonder why now. I don’t think you could build a stadium which is less aimed at making the fan experience comfortable. A nightmare to get out of and a nightmare to get to a toilet. Fantastic atmosphere though and even more spectacular a building in person than it looks on tv. A great experience for a child of Football Italia.

Northern Virginia 0-1 Christos; Att: ~88 US Open Cup fourth qualifying round tie between Northern Virginia of Leesburg, Virginia and Christos of Baltimore, Maryland. The game was played at Segra Park, home of second tier Loudoun United. Both teams have been among the best amateur clubs in the country in recent times but this was a bit of a scrappy one. The officiating didn’t help. Christos now go into the draw for the first round proper of the 2024 tournament which will be played in March. This is the first time I’ve managed all of the qualifying rounds of the Open Cup. The dream of getting to every round of the 2024 version is still alive but they’ve announced that all games for the rest of the tournament will be played midweek. So I’ll need the localish teams to me to go on some good runs and even then I can already see a midweek in May where I’m probably going to be unable to get to a game due to work. We’ll see how it goes.

Honestly basically anywhere in Manhattan south of 96th street where you can get a hotel will be better than Times Square, which is objectively the worst place on the planet. Unfortunately - or fortunately if you are a local - most of the hotels are in parts of town that aren’t necessarily the bits you’ll want to spend time in outside of the touristy stuff. I’d generally say that anywhere between 41st street and 14th street (excluding anywhere around Port Authority) is a good area to be situated because you’ll have good transport links to everything that isn’t walkable. If you can get something in the Village then you’ll be laughing but there aren’t too many hotels there, as far as I’m aware.

My experience of the bigger clubs in Belgium is that they relax the rules on getting tickets when the teams aren’t performing. When I was over there it was easy to get tickets for Club Brugge but difficult to get them for Anderlecht and Standard without a membership. Gent is infinitely better than Brugge as a city.

Watching this game on a constantly buffering BBC stream might actually be purgatory. And yet here I am, committing to watching another 30+ minutes of it.

DC United 2-1 Medeama Ghana was the focus of the inaugural Africa Week Festival in Washington DC this year and to finish off the week the reigning Ghanaian champions Medeama travelled to face DC United. The home side missed out on the play-offs and parted ways with their little known English manager, Wayne Rooney, last week. The US showed their ongoing high regard for both Africa and football by not granting visas to a significant number of Medeama players and officials. Despite all of that, it was a very decent game with what was left of the Medeama squad clearly taking it very seriously and probably unlucky to lose on the day. I managed to pick up a ticket for $10 (around £8.25 nowadays) which was pretty good value for an opportunity to see an African club live for the first time. A not too bad crowd turned up considering how little Americans tend to be bothered about actually seeing interesting sides - but give them 2 EPL reserve teams playing at walking pace and charge them $100 and you'll get a good 60,000. Medeama apparently come from a town of around 35,000 people. So if anyone can get a Falkirk or Queen of the South or Motherwell or whoever over for New York Tartan Week or similar nonsense then I might actually bother to join those celebrations for once.

Arlington SA 2-3 Yinz United Att: ~40 Second qualifying round of the US Open Cup about 100 yards from the Pentagon in Arlington, VA. Arlington SA are a local academy and have had players go on to play for the US national team. Yinz United are from Maryland though their name and colours betray links to Pittsburgh/Western Pennsylvania. Decent enough game on an awful plastic pitch covered in Boeing branding - the company’s new HQ is next door. The pictures I took were awful even by my standards but it was quite a nice setting for a game, with the Potomac River, railway and airport on one side and the Pentagon on the other.

DCFC 1-0 MoCo 1776; Att: ~25 I saw a big groundhog on the way to this game, which was fitting as for the second year in a row I was heading to DCFC’s US Open Cup first qualifying round tie and for the second year in a row the kickoff time i’d seen online was wrong. An added thunderstorm delay meant that I couldn’t stay for much of this one but what I did see was decent enough entertainment. MoCo - from the Maryland suburbs of Washington - seem to have started the game with 10 men for some reason but gave a decent account of themselves. I managed to do every round of the Scottish Cup in 14/15 and have been hoping to do every round of the US Open Cup since I moved here. The geography of the country, travel costs, midweek rounds and the local(ish) teams getting knocked out early each year have made it impossible so far but I live in hope for 2024. Interestingly, the first qualifier for next year’s edition was played before the final of the 2023 edition. The game was played on the pitches next to the rusting skeleton of the old RFK Stadium. There’s talk of a new stadium being built on the site - the city seems more open to it now that the local NFL team have followed up getting rid of their racist nickname with getting rid of their scumbag owner - but in the meantime it’s a nice backdrop for games.

Flamengo 0-0 Internacional Att: 58,892 Bucket list item as I went to see Flamengo at the Maracana under the lights on a rainy Saturday night in Rio. Flamengo seemingly want you to come to their games slightly more than São Paulo as they at least sell tickets to foreigners - as long as you go along to buy them in person at the stadium, their HQ, or a number of their shops seemingly picked at random. So I popped over to the Maracana on a rainy matchday morning only to find that Flamengo is the only business in Rio that doesn’t allow card payments and that I’d left most of my cash in my bag. Fortunately there was an ATM half a mile away so I managed to get the tickets with only minor damage to this gringo’s pride. The outside of the stadium, and the area around it, is pretty grim. The experience of getting around outside the ground in the pouring rajn was made even more awful by constant aggressive attempts to punt you tickets, food, ponchos and other tat by seemingly endless numbers of people. Fortunately the inside of the ground more than made up for it as the atmosphere was incredible. Made all the better by the two ends taking it in turn to start songs and the incredible acoustics under the big roof. Not enough teams wear red and black imo and the colours looked great in the stands. The game itself was abysmal with very little quality on show so the less said about it the better. Only I could go to Brazil and not manage to see a goal in two games. Apparently this is not a valid reason to cancel a trip to the Christ the Redeemer statue tomorrow in order to go to Botafogo v Bahia instead.

São Paulo 0-0 Botafogo Att: 51,946 My ongoing attempt to bankrupt myself in a big birthday year continues this week down in Brazil. Though flights were less than half of what it will cost to get back to Scotland for a week in December and pints are less than £2 so things are actually in not too bad shape. Brazilians do not want you to attend their football matches apparently and São Paulo have made it impossible to book tickets for a game without a CPF, kind of the equivalent of a national insurance number. Fortunately I’ve got a mate in the states who supports them and his brother sorted us out with tickets. Botofogo are running away with the league but São Paulo really should have won the match. Both teams put out weakened lineups due to big games in the cup and on the continental stage either side of this one. An entertaining watch nonetheless and James Rodriguez, Lucas Moura and Alexandre Pato all featured for São Paulo at different points. Cracking old style stadium and a great atmosphere. Big away support too though they were a bit quiet.

Pumas UNAM 0-1 Querétaro, 03/08/23 It’s the first knockout round of the Leagues Cup, a newish tournament consisting of all of the teams in MLS and Liga MX, which is being played exclusively in the United States. The US capital hosted a game between Mexican clubs Pumas UNAM and Queretaro tonight which I headed along to. Pumas had taken a big away support to their 3-0 win at DC United on Saturday - a match with an announced attendance of 14,599 - including supporters clubs from across the US. So of course the people running US/North American soccer had decided to wait to announce the date and location of the games in the next round until the day after that DC United match, making travel basically impossible for anyone with a job or anyone not made of money. They also decided to open only half of the stadium, keeping the pricing the same as for your run of the mill DC United game, but hadn’t opened the cheapest sections of the ground. They also decided to play the game at the same time that local team DC United were playing up in Philadelphia. So all of those factors led to an attendance which was probably about the same as a decent sized Scottish League 2 crowd. I truly believe that if the people that run US/North American football met even the very low bar of the SPFL’s understanding of football supporters then the global football landscape would look very different in 2023. This tournament is now essentially being marketed as the Lionel Messi show - replays of Inter Miami games appear above live games on the Apple TV listings - so they seem to have basically chucked any plan for any sort of engagement with the local Mexican community. They did still manage to play the US national anthem - but not the Mexican one - for reasons of patriotism, I guess. Anyway, there was still a very vocal, if quite small, Pumas support and a smaller, but still decent, Queretaro support along with fans of other Mexican teams and gringos such as myself in attendance. I know nothing about Queretaro but they are a team from a relatively small city not too far from Mexico City and Ronaldinho played for them for a bit, apparently. Pumas are one of the three big teams in Mexico City and were originally the university team of National Autonomous University of Mexico. They’re still owned by the university but are run separately nowadays. They’ve also got one of the best badges in football. It was a decent game between two decent teams. Pumas were the better team for much of the game until Queretaro took the lead through a very good goal in the 74th minute. Their keeper then saved a penalty a couple of minutes later and they managed to comfortably see out the game from there. They'll head up to the middle of nowhere in Massachusetts to play New England Revolution in the next round which will take place sometime early next week.

Haukar 1-1 UMF Sindri KFG 2-0 KF Leiknir Reykjavik 3-0 Ungmennafelag Njardvikur Got to a few other games in Iceland in their 3rd, 4th and 2nd tiers over the weekend. Leiknir play on a nice grass pitch - a real novelty in these parts - and the game had a very Scottish feel. Not least because there were two Scots playing for Njardvik, including big Marc McAusland of St Mirren fame. Small world. The KFG game turned out to be at Stjarnan’s stadium so I got to see the words “Celtic” and “Motherwell” both on the wall of the stadium and in their trophy case. Another nice unexpected Scottish coincidence. I was also able to catch the penalties in the Women’s Cup semi-final between Stjarnan and Breidablik which was in the same ground just before.

I got a good deal with Play out of Canada and back to the US which was how I managed to justify it. Probably the best budget airline I’ve been on to date (based on a very small sample size mind) and I believe they fly from Glasgow too. You will indeed have seen it on the bus to Stjarnan. On the left as you head south out of Reykjavik.

Breidablik 5-0 Budocnost Podgorica Att: 845 Bit of a bucket list one for me as I managed to get to a Champions League preliminary round game before they do away with them for the 24/25 season. The CL preliminary round is a mini-tournament contested each year by the champions of the countries with the four worst coefficients in UEFA. The club from the country with the fourth worst coefficient hosts both the semi-finals and a final over a four day period. This year the hosts were Breidablik of Iceland and the other three countries represented were Montenegro, San Marino and Andorra. I couldn’t make it over for the semis due to work commitments, which was disappointing, but still pleased to get to the final contested by Breidablik and Budocnost. Expected a lot more from the Montenegrins - no idea why - but Breidablik were up by 4 by half-time. They will now play Shamrock Rovers in the first round and it’ll be interesting to see how they get on as they played some really good football in this one. Decent atmosphere created by the youngest ultras group I’ve ever seen and a nice little ground. They were selling knock-off Big Macs which were very good too.

Canada 2-2 Guadeloupe Att: 15,301 This was definitely a game of football. Guadeloupe grabbed an unlikely late equaliser to grab an unlikely draw against a Canada reserve team in this Gold Cup tie in Toronto. Otherwise it was pretty uninspiring stuff. David Wotherspoon and Ross County’s Loturi were unused subs for Canada. They do a cracking hot dog at BMO Field. We got tickets for the equivalent of £7 too so can’t complain.

Forge 4-3 Atletico Ottawa Att: 6,917 Great entertainment in the Canadian Premier League and also undoubtedly the two worst full-time football teams I’ve ever seen. A goal in the first 20 seconds, an own goal from a passback, a scrap, constant defensive and goalkeeping mistakes, a cracking free-kick put into the top corner. Great stuff. They play in the Hamilton Tiger-Cats Canadian Football stadium which is far too big for them so only one stand is opened for their games other than for people willing to pay for the posh seats. It just happens that the stand they decided to open for normal folk is in the baking sun. Bizarre decision for a summer league. Decent enough place to watch football otherwise.

Richmond Kickers 0-1 Forward Madison; USL League 1; Att: 4,902 Some third tier football in the former capital of the Confederacy. Richmond were formed in the 90s and have a pretty decent history by American standards, including winning the national US Open Cup back in 1995. Richmond is quite a big football town - it has the highest local tv ratings for the English/Saudi/Emirati Premier League in the US. Forward Madison, from Wisconsin, were formed just a few years ago and have a flamingo on their crest because the official bird of their city is the lawn flamingo, apparently. The football was dire so there's not much to be said about that - Madison scored in the second half but both teams struggled in the final third throughout. Good crowd though for that level in a quite bizarre stadium setup with a shut big stand on one side of the pitch and everyone stuffed into an Italian style curved stand on the other sideline. Nice little setup with local breweries and food trucks.. It was Pride Night at the club too so there was a bunch of community stuff going on around that. Atmosphere was poor although there was a small band of traveling Madison supporters in front of me who tried to get a very American-y atmosphere going. It can't be easy or cheap to get from Madison to Richmond so fair play to them. Richmond Greyhound Bus Station is hellish and is only beaten by Times Square, Atlanta Greyhound Station and the State of Florida in the worst place in America stakes. Richmond itself is an interesting little city and well worth a visit.

South Melbourne 5-1 Altona Magic Lovely setting for some NPL Victoria football. Altona went down to 10 men just before halftime with the score at 1-1 and collapsed in the second half. First time I’ve ever seen a winger with bleached hair taking long throws on both touch lines. South Melbourne used to be called Hellas and have historic links with the Greek community in Melbourne. They were named the Oceania team of the century and used to be one of the bigger clubs in the country pre-A League. Altona is also known as Vardar, after the Skopje club of the same name, and has historic links to migrants from the country now known as North Macedonia. Good few hundred people there. Nice little cafe in the stand. Stadium is probably what Meadowbank could have been like if they’d put any thought into it at all.