Can someone tell me what kickoff time is next Saturday. I have to go downtown to watch the game here in Toronto but have just learned that my darling wife has committed me to something else. I've got to come up with a plan fast to extricate myself. Ahhh life was so simple this time last year in Niigata. Anyone else out there reliving that day, The great party before hand outside the railway station. The excitement going to the Stadium. Brutal first half. Mattie's goal. Having the craic in a little Japanees waterering hole filled to the brim with green clad supporters. The only English on the door - a sign saying NO FOREIGNERS. and that night in the Black Bull, Niigata, sitting in the rafters while the whole place swayed to rebel songs. .... F.This .. .think I'll go for a pint.
Ahhhh yes! Memories of Niigata. Like a hotel room that I really only used to store my stuff - you can live in bars and 7-11s for 2 days, y'know. Meeting 10 of the guys coming from Tokyo at the train station with about 1M other Irish. And every Japanese woman wanting to have her photograph taken with the exotic singing drunken strangers. (Who drinks beer at 10AM anyway?) The Japanese police not having a clue what to do with us, or who we were. Everywhere you looked tricolours from all over the world (and Ireland, too ). Meeting the Cameroonian FA in our hotel the morning of the game - they gave us tshirts, but for some reason they were all Small. Even the XLs were small. Now, that was quite a sight - hairy beer bellies plopping out from underneath Cameroonian tshirts that looked like they were made for 14 year old boys. Made the boys look like deformed leprechauns with short arms, big bellies and a hungover look on their faces. Immobile from the hangovers, they woulda made the perfect garden gnomes anyway. Drinking in a bar called Milan, where all the waitresses were dressed in AC Milan shirts - worst mistake by the owner? Pulling out the karaoke machine at 3 in the AM to a raving drunken bunch of Paddys who could just about remember Mattie's goal. 2nd worst mistake by owner? Deciding to sing his favourite song - Sexy Funky Monkey(!). The unanimous look of "what the fu......" on everyone's face. Eating down some back-alley, having not a word of Japanese, getting well fed on food of a type - still don't know what it was, and 6 hours later being absolutely hammered with the owner of this tiny back-alley restaurant and I still don't know how we bonded or what we were taliking about. Being interviewed on Japanese TV - strangest question "It is a big surprise, the Irish, they drink so much?" Obviously a journalist who didn't do his homework. The roar when the team came out, the roar when they waved, the roar for Stan and for Mick and then 10,000 losing their voices in unison when Mattie scored. And finding myself at 11 minutes past 7 the next morning outside a 7-11 with about 50 other Irish with the owner wondering how, in the name of God, he had no beer left by 7:30 in the morning. And Mattie's goal.......ahhhh, yes! What memories of Niigata, indeed.