The thrill of stumbling upon a football match while on holiday | Football

TThe guidebook I had on vacation in Oslo last summer recommended the museum dedicated to sculptor Gustav Vigeland (portraitist of human struggle, recluse, twice-divorced, dog-hater, and alleged Nazi sympathizer, whose most famous work took 14 years to complete and resembles a giant phallus). So I set out. But as I strolled through the adjacent park, I saw some spotlights.

Drawn by them, I found a small sports stadium and a football match in progress, one important enough to charge an entrance fee of 100 kronor, just shy of 10. Vigeland was forgotten as I joined a handful of spectators on a shallow terrace. This was not in the guidebook. It was hard to tell that I was watching a Norwegian fourth division match, Lokomotiv Oslo losing 2-1 at home to Skjetten in a match so obscure that no detailed report, not even a list of goalscorers, seems to exist online. Still, it was a highlight of my holiday.

There’s something exciting about stumbling across a football match while on holiday. It’s not about organising a trip around your team’s pre-season schedule; it’s about finding a match on your trip through a stroke of luck and a bit of last-minute planning.

This has long appealed to me. In 1989, when I was a 12-year-old visiting family in Canada, I saw Niagara Falls, the CN Tower and the new Toronto Sky Dome. But just as much fun was the sunny Sunday evening I spent with my dad and uncle, sitting with a few hundred other fans in a single outdoor stand at Centennial Park Stadium, watching the Toronto Blizzard beat the Montreal Supra in the Canadian Soccer League.

It was different to the professional matches back home. I borrowed my dad’s camera and was able to park myself unhindered behind the goal and take some amateur action shots. “Do you have one?” the Supras keeper shouted happily after a Blizzard shot flew wide. Paul Peschisolido, then a teenager who had established himself in the Blizzard team, was easily their best player and scored both goals. I would still remember him even if he hadn’t had a long career in England.

A year later, a bleak summer holiday in an Anglesey caravan park was brightened when I heard that Sunderland, newly promoted to the First Division, were playing two local pre-season friendlies. My father took me along to watch them win unconvincingly against an Anglesey XI and Bangor City, and we wondered how they could avoid an immediate return to Division Two. They didn’t.

I have continued to look forward to games on holiday as an adult. In 2009 I went to Reykjavik when Iceland was dealing with the fallout from the previous year’s financial crisis. For most of the trip I was the standard tourist, visiting the Golden Circle and the Blue Lagoon. But then I went to Laugardalsvollur, the national stadium, for a national league game between Fram and Hafnarfjordur.

Even the locals seemed disappointed: around 900 fans milled about in a stadium built for 10,000. A press box big enough for 50 reporters was occupied by a single man in a flat cap, who took copious notes during the first half before disappearing, and four indifferent teenage girls with their feet on the fences. None of them seemed to be paying much attention to Frams’ goalkeeper, Hannes Thor Halldorsson, who by this point had yet to achieve the dual career highs of playing for Iceland in a World Cup and directing a music video for one of their Eurovision entries.

As Halldorsson made save after save to deny a dominant Hafnarfjordur a narrow 2-0 win, a woman in my row turned to me and said something in Icelandic. I apologized for not understanding and explained that I was a journalist on holiday from England.

This referee is crap, she said. Criticizing match officials: an international language. We chatted some more, her curiosity piqued by the presence of an Englishman at an Icelandic league match, before we parted ways at the end of the game. The next day, having lunch in a city-center café, I was shocked to see her appear at my table.

She sat down. We discussed Iceland’s financial collapse; the way Alistair Darling, then Chancellor of the Exchequer, had led Britain’s crackdown; what it all meant for the future. The party’s over for us, she said. Then, with anger in her eyes, she added: When you get back to England, you can tell people Alistair Darling is a fucking arsehole. No guidebook or museum has ever revealed a place like that to me.