Borussia Dortmund v FSV Mainz 05. 20/04/13

"Buying a denim jacket and covering it with badges would probably be the final straw when it comes to my wife thinking I'm having a midlife crisis"

Borussia Dortmund 2-0 FSV Mainz 05. Signal Iduna Park.
Saturday 20/04/13 

If football is truly like religion, then Dortmund has to be one of the great pilgrimages to make. To most of the world it is a pretty unglamorous industrial city in the Ruhr Area. To football fans it is the home of the biggest average home support in Europe, the remarkable Yellow Wall and Jurgen Klopp's exciting young team that has torn through Germany and the continent in the last few years.

The masses gather at Signal Iduna Park

Game two of the Dusseldorf 2013 Weekend was Borussia Dortmund v FSV Mainz 05. The wonderful transport system of the Fatherland did it's typically excellent job in depositing us in Dortmund after a 30 minute journey during which the previous days tiredness and hangovers were combated with that very German medicine of Jagermeister poured into cans of beer.

Dortmund branded beer being drunk in the ticket office

Signal Iduna Park has it's own U-Bahn station which they've used that well know German imagination to call Stadion. The ground itself is in the middle of a park with not many bars around but this, being Germany, is not a problem as fans (and children) just mingle on the streets around the ground drinking bottles and pints of beer which can be bought from street vendors and are Dortmund branded. You were even fully encouraged to sink a couple of these while queuing for tickets and let's be honest, it would have been rude not to adopt some of the local customs.

Child drinking a beer - as you do

The alcohol branding machine got even better inside the stadium with each beer being served in a plastic cup with a Dortmund player on. You pay a €5 deposit for one and then use it for the rest of the afternoon before returning it at the end to get your money back. Or in our case, collect the glasses so you end up taking home a set of ready-to-use pint cups featuring Mats Hummels, Marco Reuss and ultimately Herr Klopp which go down as well as a hog roast at a barmitzvah in the typically anti-German English pub.

New pint glasses for the cabinet at home

There are a few stadiums in the world that take your breath away when you first see them after climbing the stairs and catching your first glimpse through the entranceway at Dortmund is without a doubt one of them. Our seats were in the top tier, tucked away high in a corner looking down on the Yellow Wall on our right. The place was simply huge and when it filled up before kick off the atmosphere was electric, particularly when the 25,000 on the Wall whipped out their scarves and flags for You'll Never Walk Alone.

The Yellow Wall in full flow

Marco Reuss put's Dortmund 1-0 up after 60 seconds and
that's game over

For a big match you could imagine the noise inside the place being so loud that even Beethoven would have been able to hear it, but this wasn't one of those great occasions. With Bayern Munich having the Bundesliga in the bag, there was little to play for save a tune up for the small matter of a midweek Champions League semi final clash with Real Madrid and to make it even more of a non-event, it was effectively game over after just 60 seconds when Reuss put Dortmund 1-0 ahead. They added a second through Robert Lewandowski with five to play but in truth it was a meaningless game and it showed although that didn't stop the stadium rocking.

The Yellow Wall after the game

Signal Iduna Park

Afterwards we hung around and ventured onto the terrace and it's really only then you appreciate the vastness of not just that particular part of the ground but of the whole place. It was empty at this point and looking up the Wall was enough to give you vertigo. If you can imagine one of those epic movie scenes where an athlete runs up the steps of a stadium, then the scale of it is probably best summed up that if one of those scenes were shot at Signal Iduna Park, it would be over after a quarter of the terrace had been climbed when Sylvester Stalone keeled over from the effort.

On the route back to Stadion Station we stumbled across Sportwelt Dortmund, a large swimming pool facility which on matchdays bizarrely has a large bar opened right next to the pool. We took several pints in their, meeting some of our favourite types of German fans in the shape of the denim jackets covered in badges brigade. Despite the dangerous mixture of beer and a body of water, nobody took a dive in with the most risky moment being Rumble seriously considering buying a jacket which could well have led to a divorce on our return home.

Rumble's denim jacket heroes

The day was finished back in Dortmund city centre and Katharinentor, a delightful little pub a stones throw from the station. It showed the live evening game featuring the mighty Wolfsburg with the added bonus of Jens Lehmann on commentary. Katharinentor had a large array of beers and it only seemed right we tried to sample one of each, which meant we never actually left it to explore anymore of Dortmund before the last train back to Dusseldorf. And we even managed to avoid ending up in Mochengladbach this time.

Borussia Dortmund: Roman Weidenfeller, Lukasz Piszczek, Neven Subotic, Mats Hummels, Marcel Schmelzer, Ilkay Gundogan, Nuri Sahin, Jakub Blaszcykowski (Kevin Grosskreutz), Mario Gotze (Julian Schieber), Marco Reuss 1 (Moritz Leitner), Robert Lewandowski 1.

FSV Mainz 05: Christian Wetklo, Stefan Bell, Bo Svensson, Nikolce Noveski, Zdenek Pospech, Julian Baumgartlinger, Yunus Malli, Marcel Risse (Adam Szalai), Nikita Rukavytsya (Marco Caligiuri), Shawn Parker (Nicolai Muller).

Attendance: 80,645

VfL Bochum v St Pauli. 19/04/13

"Bochum, concrete jungle where dreams are made of, there's nothing you can't do, now you're in Bochum"

VfL Bochum 1848 3-0 St Pauli. rewirpowerSTADION
Friday 19/04/13

The wonders of German public transport mean that you can stay in one place - in this case Dusseldorf - and from there get to three different places in three days for three games of football. That was the plan for this particular April weekend as Rumble and I were to head to VfL Bochum v St Pauli on Friday, Borussia Dortmund v FSV Mainz 05 on Saturday and then over the border into the Netherlands for VVV Venlo v FC Twente on Sunday.

Schumacher Alt - a delightful beer in Dusseldorf

Dusseldorf itself was an excellent city which got even better when we realised that our double bed that had been accidentally booked was in fact two singles that could be pushed apart. No offence to Mr Rumble, but combining our night time bodily functions in one confined bed would have been like letting off a nuclear bomb. There were a huge number off beer halls in the city which we felt it only right to visit before the train to Bochum for game one, a 30 minute or so journey. The best of these was probably the Schumacher-Brau although it was unfortunately not named after either Michael or Ralf - a marketing trick missed if ever there was one.

rewirpowerSTADION

Once in Bochum, we headed straight to the rewirpowerSTADION - a fine combination of random small and upper case letters - where we found an excellent pub directly opposite the stadiums tram stop called Ritterburg with memorabilia, beer and that standard item in all good German bars, the electronic dartboard. The joy was short lived however as the dart board didn't actually work.

The fan bar - with non-working electronic dartboard

AZZURO BOCHUM!

There was a massive attendance for a 2.Bundesliga game, with nearly a capacity crowd of 30,000 packed into the stadium. It's single tiered all the way around with a home terrace behind one goal and the visiting St Pauli fans on a small piece of terracing in a corner. Despite the enclosed nature, the ground retains it's floodlight pylons and the atmosphere inside from such a compact yet large arena was excellent.

rewirpowerSTADION - excellent floodlight pylons

The visiting St Pauli support

The best thing of all however was the food selection. Germany is already renowned for it's food and beer inside it's football grounds but the selection of sausages at rewierpowerSTADION would be enough to get even Louie Spence excited. He'd also no doubt have been excited about Bochum's manager, a certain Peter Neurure who was not only sporting jeans in the technical area but a quite stunning squirrel's tail that he'd stuck on his top lip.

Little boy enjoying a pint of beer

You just couldn't turn down a nibble of sausage at those prices

It's obviously not just dressing like a 1970s porn star that Mr Neurure excels at as his side breezed past St Pauli with ease scoring three unanswered goals. Zlatko Dedic netted a first half brace including one from the penalty spot and Yusuke Tasaka was the other man on target in an extremely impressive Bochum performance.

Peter Neurure - by day Bochum manager, by night 1970s porn star

It was back into the town centre afterwards where we found a pub packed with Bochum supporters and partied the night away, including teaching them a new song in "Bochum, concrete jungle where dreams are made of" which we were promised would be used on the terraces at the next game. If it was, then we are truly sorry as in the cold light of a sober day it becomes clear that is the worst football song in history and that includes anything John Barnes-related. The combination of German beer and a wonderful clock that ran backwards led to all kinds of confusion and we only just made the last train back to Dusseldorf. Thinking that was that, we settled down for the journey only to both fall asleep and find ourselves arriving in Monchengladbach at midnight.

Backwards clock + beer + last train to catch = recipe for disaster

Bochum till we die

In England, this would have been a disaster but fear not, Borussia Monchengladbach had been at home that evening as well and that meant Football Special Trains running late into the night. What could have been a total cock up turned into no issue at all as we simply joined the Monchengladbach fans to return to Dusseldorf. God bless Deutschebahn.

rewirpowerSTADION in all her Friday night glory

You'll Never Walk Alone - Bochum style

Bochum FC provide vital life skills to kids, such as climbing

VfL Bochum: Andreas Luthe, Paul Freier, Marcel Malritz, Jonas Acquistapace, Michael Lumb, Yusuke Tasaka 1, Leon Goretzka (Christoph Dabrowski), Christoph Kramer, Marc Rzatkowski (Faton Toski), Zlatko Dedic 2, Mirkan Aydin (Michael Delura).

St Pauli: Philipp Tschauner, Jan-Philipp Kalla, Markus Thorandt, Christopher Avevor, Sebastian Schachten, Patrick Funk, Florian Kringe (Fabian Binge), Lennart Thy (Marius Ebbers), Dennis Daube, Fin Bartels, Daniel Ginczek (Akaki Gogia). 

Attendance: 26,072

Poland v England. 16/10/12

"We can put a man on the moon and split the atom but we can't shut the roof on a bloody football stadium"

Poland P-P England. Stadion Narodowy.
Tuesday 16/10/13

Thank God for Ryanair. Four words that you are about as likely to hear together as "Ann Widdecombe is hot". But this is a genuinely heartfelt thanks to Michael O'Leary for the fact that he was able to fly me to Lodz and back for less than £60 so that the trip to see the World Cup qualifier between Poland and England wasn't a massive and pointless black hole in the wallet.

It rained so hard that people turned to blurs

Stadion Narodowy from the outside was impressive. It would
be more impressive inside if the roof shut.

You see because of the incompetence of whoever runs Stadion Narodowy in Warsaw - and I suspect it may be Frank Spencer - there was no game to see. Rain that would have had Noah working double time had fallen in the 24 hours before the game and despite that, nobody seemed to have the brainwave of making use of the fact the stadium has a retractable roof.

Oh look, an open roof. That seems sensible

Indeed, there wasn't even any sort of announcement that the game had been called off inside the stadium. Most England fans found out via text messages or calls from home that it had been postponed before Mr Spencer had the good grace to inform those in the ground.

More suited to Tom Daley than Wayne Rooney

It was pretty obvious from the moment you got a glimpse of the Stadion Narodowy pitch that there was going to be no football played. Both goal mouths were covered in surface water and it certainly didn't need the match official to come out and throw a ball around for ten minutes to confirm it. What he should have done is called for more volunteers from the stands to invade the pitch, as two chaps did to act out a penalty shoot out with an invisible ball before aquaplaning away from the chasing stewards in scenes that could have come straight from a Chuckle Brothers show - with Paul and Barry funnily enough being another two men who could have done a better job than the Polish FA.

These pitch invaders stage a penalty shoot out to alleviate
the boredom

Cue the Benny Hill music as the invaders aquaplane away from
the chasing stewards

The stadium itself was very impressive. Built for the recent European Championships, it was due to be packed to capacity for this game and the atmosphere would have been raucous if the flag display before the postponement was anything to go by. The outside of the ground was lit up in red and white which made for a nice spectacle. What didn't was the three security checks England fans had to go through before getting to the turnstile, by which team the weather had turned most peoples tickets to mush making them incompatible with the scanning machines.

Polish fans do their display with it being obvious there will
be no football today

Easily the best thing about the stadium was the toilets and chiefly the fact they featured a large number of those new Dyson airblade hand dryers. It led to the surreal scene of a plethora of England fans stripping off in order to dry their clothes. Not that it made much difference as two minutes after leaving the venue you were soaked to the bone again.

Lack of football aside, it was a very decent trip. Ryanair flew me into Lodz from where an £8, two hour train to Warsaw was taken. Anywhere you can buy pints for £1.20 or drink  flavoured vodka straight is always likely to be a good time and this was no different. The city itself used to be something of a concrete jungle but has shaken off a lot of it's communist past in recent years with western style skyscrapers popping up all over the place. The crown jewel of these tall buildings remains one that was built by the Soviets however in the form of the Palace of Culture and Science - even if the locals don't tend to think so.

Palace of Science and Culture - a great communist building

The Old Town was a beautiful part of the city and the place to drink before the game, which I unfortunately missed having spent most of Tuesday afternoon in bed sleeping off one of the most horrific hangovers ever. That was induced after drinking with a Leeds and a Watford fan in a bar the previous evening and partaking in "White Ghosts" - shots which basically made me into what they are named after.

White Ghosts - the worst drinks in the world

Having walked to the ground for the game - a huge mistake that left my shoes needing three straight days of drying once home - the metro was taken back and a quick search on the internet back at the £9 a night hostel made it pretty apparent that extending the visit by a day to take in the rearranged trip wasn't really on the cards.

The three day trip cost just £150 in total for flights, accommodation and food and drink so even though it ultimately proved to be a total waste of time in footballing terms, it was ultimately not a total waste of an obscene amount of money. It could have been had I been hit with a large fine for not having a valid metro ticket on the way to Warsaw Central Station for the journey back to Lodz, but when the ticket guard realised I was English he kindly let me off due to the football debacle, even offering his appologise on behalf of Poland. Perhaps he knew Mr Spencer? But thank God for him. And most importantly, one last time - thank God for Ryanair.

Alemannia Aachen v Darmstadt 98. 06/10/12

"What the hell is a potato beetle?"

Alemannia Aachen 1-1 Darmstadt 98.
Neue Tivoli. Saturday 06/10/12.

Cologne has it all - a bloody great cathedral, a plethora of great little bierkellers, a river, a chocolate factory and a bridge. It is also very well connected (even by German standards) in terms of trains and that made it the perfect location from where to launch a trip to the 3.Bundesliga game between Alemannia Aachen and Darmstadt 98.

Cologne Cathedral - one of the worlds finest

Aachen have fallen on hard times in recent seasons. They reached the last 16 of the UEFA Cup in 2005 having qualified as runners up in the German Cup the previously season and they spent 2006-07 in the Bundesliga. They moved into Neue Tivoli, a 33,000 stadium in 2009 but since then it's been all downhill with financial mismanagement that would make even Peter Ridsdale blush. For this campaign they find themselves in the third tier with relegation into the regional leagues and bankruptcy a very real possibility.

Needing all the help they can get then, Rumble and I decided to give them some hard earned cash through our attendance and even had the good grace to take along a couple of women with us for their first experience of German football. Who says romance is dead?

Bitburger and a match ticket

It's certainly not dead in Cologne, Germany's unofficial gay capital. On my previous visit in 2010 we spent the majority of it accidentally frequenting the cities gay bars which ultimately led to a huge man putting his hand down my trousers and onto my bare bottom. With two girls on tour this time, that was thankfully avoided.

Fruh Kolsch remains my favourite of the various types of Kolsch you can sample in Cologne which naturally makes Fruh am Dom opposite the cathedral the best place to drink in the city. We spent Friday morning in there, moving onto the cobbled streets between the cathedral and the riverfront in the evening to put away a fair share of varying types of beer which was excellent preparation for the Saturday.

Aachen Town Hall

Aachen itself is about 45 minutes on the train and the German football regulation hangover cure of Jagermeister poured into a beer was very much needed. After arriving in the town we had a cheeky look around the cathedral and the grand town hall before catching a bus straight to the ground. We'd heard good things about the fans bar at the stadium and it was even better than first thought once we arrived at the Neue Tivoli.

Der Neue Tivoli

Just incase you didn't know where you were...

The ground itself is not too dissimilar to new builds in England - in the middle of nowhere with just retail outlets for company. Inside, it's like a German version of Leicester/Southampton/Middlesbrough (delete as appropriate). Stands all of the same size, single tiered with the main stand having a row of executive boxes behind it. The difference of course being that this is the Fatherland and so behind one of the goals you have an 11,000 capacity terrace - the Bitburger Wall - which is where we found ourselves with the raucous home support. No problems if you needed the toilet there, with the gents featuring no less than 25 individual urinals. Yes, I counted them.

Not quite a full house for this huge 3.Bundesliga game

25 urinals - the ultimate football stadium toilet

And now for more on that fans bar. Put simply, imagine the best fans bar you can and then make it ten times better and you have what the Neue Tivoli does. Built into the stadium, you showed your match ticket to go in and after that you didn't have to leave to re-enter the ground via a turnstile - that was it, you were in the stadium. There was merchandise on the walls, Bitburger galore and even table service. We were served by a wonderfully attractive young barmaid with beer after beer and before we knew it it was kick off time. No worries there sir, just go through a set of glass doors and you are straight on the concourse, where you can buy more beer for the game.

Tivoli fans bar - table service all round

Alemannia fans enjoying some pre-game beers in the
wonderful fans bar

The game itself was pretty poor, two second half goals seeing it end in a 1-1 draw in pretty horrific wind and rain. One moment of magic the like of which Sky Sports News would show on loop for two weeks if it happened in the Premier League was the opening goal from Aachen's Denis Podzer after he collected a throw in on his chest, did some keepy uppys and then hit a dipping volley from about 30 yards over the keeper. Wunderbar! Kacper Tatara grabbed a far less glamorous equaliser for Darmstadt.

The Bitburger Wall with the Aachen Ultras far up to the left

With entertainment lacking on the pitch, it allowed plenty of time to admire the atmosphere created despite the fact the stadium was half empty and the visiting supporters were stuck high up in the opposite rafters and to devote towards appreciating what surely is the most bizarre nickname in European football - the potato beetles. After the game, our conversations back in the fans bar (where else?!) led us to discover Aachen are called that because of the yellow and black striped shirts sharing a resemblance to the insect. And that was enough to encourage even more much needed cash into the coffers with the purchasing of a toy potato beetle.

Help save Alemannia Aachen - buy a potato beetle

With each pint being justified as helping to "save" the club after the game, it took us until three hours after the final whistle had blown to finally leave Neue Tivoli for Aachen town centre and the train back to Cologne. Saturday night and Sunday afternoon were spent drinking down by the river and singing "Fog on the Rhine is all mine all mine" much to the confusion of the locals.

The world will be a poorer place without them so fingers very much crossed for the survival of the Potato Beetles - Alemannia Aachen that is, not the insect*

Alemannia Aachen's main stand

Karls Bande

*Just for the clarification of PETA and any other animal lovers out there, I do not wish extinction on the potato beetle. I just prefer Alemannia Aachen.

Alemannia Aachen: Michael Melka, Christian Weber, Thomas Stehle, Seyi Olajengbesi, Fabian Baumgartel, Kai Schwetfeger, Timmy Thiele, Timo Brauer, Marcel Heller, Denis Pozder 1 (Kristoffer Andersen), Oguzhan Kefkir.

Darmstadt 98: Jan Zimmermann, Andreas Gaebler, Cem Islamoglu, Christian Beisel, Michael Stegmayer, Hanno Behrens, Danny Latza (Marcus Steegmann), Preston Zimmermann, Elton da Costa, Uwe Hesse (Sebastian Zielinsky), Kacper Tatara 1 (Marc Schnier).

Attendance: 13,700.