The guidebook I had during a holiday in Oslo late last summer recommended the museum dedicated to sculptor Gustav Vigeland (portrayer of human struggle, recluse, twice divorced, hater of dogs, and alleged Nazi sympathiser, whose most well-known work took 14 years to complete and resembles a giant phallus). So off I went. But as I strolled through the neighbouring park, I caught sight of some floodlights.
Drawn to them, I found a small sports stadium, and a football match in progress, one significant enough to be charging an entrance fee of 100 kroner – just under £10. Vigeland was forgotten as I joined a smattering of spectators on a shallow terrace. This hadn’t been in the guidebook. It took effort to establish that I was watching a match from the Norwegian fourth division, Lokomotiv Oslo losing 2-1 at home to Skjetten in a contest so obscure that no detailed report – not even a record of the goalscorers – seems to exist online. Yet it was a highlight of my break.
There’s something thrilling about stumbling across a football match on holiday. This isn’t about organising a trip around your team’s pre-season schedule; it’s about finding, by happy accident and a bit of last-minute planning, a game on your travels.
This has long appealed to me. In 1989, as 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 uncovered stand at Centennial Park Stadium, as Toronto Blizzard beat Montreal Supra in the Canadian Soccer League.
It was unlike the professional matches back home. Borrowing my dad’s camera, I was able to park myself behind the goal, unchallenged, and take some amateurish action shots. “Did you get that one?” shouted Supra’s goalkeeper to me cheerfully after a Blizzard shot flew wide. Paul Peschisolido, then a teenager establishing himself in the Blizzard team, was easily their best player, setting up both of their goals. I’d have remembered him even if he hadn’t gone on to a long career in England.
A year later, a gloomy summer break in an Anglesey caravan park was brightened on learning Sunderland, just promoted to the First Division, were playing two local pre-season friendlies. My dad took me to see them scrape unconvincing wins over an Anglesey XI and Bangor City, and we wondered how they might avoid an immediate return to Division Two. They didn’t.
I’ve continued looking out for games on holiday as an adult. In 2009, I went to Reykjavik as Iceland dealt with the consequences of the previous year’s financial crash. 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 domestic league match between Fram and Hafnarfjordur.
Even the locals seemed underwhelmed: around 900 fans rattled round in a stadium built for 10,000. A press box big enough for 50 reporters was occupied by one man in a flat cap, who took copious notes in the first half before disappearing, and four indifferent teenage girls with their feet up on the barriers. None of them seemed to pay much attention to Fram’s goalkeeper, Hannes Thor Halldorsson, at that time yet to reach the twin career heights of playing for Iceland at a World Cup and directing a video for one of their Eurovision Song Contest entries.
As Halldorsson made save after save to restrict a dominant Hafnarfjordur to a mere 2-0 win, a woman on my row turned to me and said something in Icelandic. I apologised for not understanding, explaining I was a journalist on holiday from England.
“This referee is shit,” she said. Criticising match officials: an international language. We talked more, her curiosity piqued by the presence of an Englishman at an Icelandic league game, before going our separate ways at full time. The following day, as I had lunch in a city centre cafe, I was shocked to see her appear at my table.
She took a seat. We discussed Iceland’s financial collapse; the way Alistair Darling, the then-Chancellor, had led the UK’s heavy-handed response; what it all meant for the future. “The party’s over for us,” she said. Then, anger flashing in her eyes, she added: “When you get back to England, you can tell people that Alistair Darling is a fucking asshole.” No guidebook or museum has ever revealed a place to me like that.