Hard 3 – Austria Salzburg 2
My very good excuse for missing this game was er..., um.... I had shed-loads of work and I had an appointment with a customer early the next day, which are both true, but ultimately I was put off by the prospect of spending half my life on the motorway for the sake of proving to other Austria fans that I’m a good fan, while struggling to explain to my girlfriend that I have too much work to be able to go out for a meal or to the movies, but I do have enough time to drive to the westernmost corner of Austria. So on Wednesday the 3rd of August, devotion had to give way to logic to maintain peace in our time. Too hard to get to Hard.
From what I heard, the game itself was another example of how we burn up more calories than the other teams without turning it into goals. I can’t pass any further comment as reading the live ticker from three weeks ago doesn’t qualify me to analyse the game any more than chopping the giant slugs in my garden entitles me to spew forth wisdoms on slug rights.
Austria Salzburg 2 – Baby Bulls 0
Better excuse this time. Months ago I agreed to go to Warsaw of all places with my girlfriend. Like the daft bastard I am, I suggested going there by car and gallantly offered to do the first stint of driving until it got light, allowing Barbara to do the other 11 hours. We set off at 4am on Friday, so this time the excuse was cast iron. In hindsight I’d advise anyone planning to drive north to Warsaw – to take the train – or fly – but not to take the road route. There is a 150 km stretch of main link road coming up from the south, leading to the outskirts of Warsaw. It was supposed to have been turned into a motorway for the Euro 2012, but the Polish government recently had to admit they might not be finished for the Euro – or even for 2015. Basically the whole road is one big stop-and-go bottleneck. Our arrogant phone call claim made just south of Cracow was unmasked as a steaming lump of crap: ‘We’re just south of Cracow; we should be there in about 2 hours’ (raucous laughter in the background on the other end of the line).
Anyway, we got there another 3 ½ hours later and after a long walk around the centre of Warsaw and down into the old town, the mobile started vibrating just as we got back to the apartment we were staying at; Schafi and Mikko both having texted me the good tidings that we had, once again, embarrassed Red Bull’s amateurs. Apparently the game wasn’t as clear cut as the score, but this really doesn’t matter, because the meaning of the game transcends the score anyway. There are higher truths. Other truths I discovered were that Warsaw is a great place to go out, it is not great for shopping, it’s true that the Polish women look fantastic - and a lot of the Polish men don’t, the city is not dirty or ugly on the posh side of the river, there are lots of great restaurants, and they have a really cute old town. But, I digress.
Austria Salzburg 3 – Hall 0
This game took place while we were driving back from Warsaw, somewhere on the road between Vienna and Salzburg. Apparently the only reason we won was that Hall were crap. I have to admit there are only two people in my circle of friends I consider worthy of providing analytical data on any given game – Raph and Drax. Raph tends to compare everything to Champions’ League standards of football, so every game is skill-wise and tactically speaking a complete disaster, and even after a 4-0 win he’ll still go home bitterly disappointed. Drax is the negative realist. He’s happy to get a 1-1 draw but never thinks we deserved it. His view of life is like the ending of the first episode of a two-part Star Trek story – you know, alien planet looming ahead, you’ve got your dialithium crystals working full power just to stay out of the planet’s gravitational pull, they can’t last forever and basically life’s grim. You know things will turn out OK in the end, but the future is a long, long way away. So it was no surprise to hear that the only way we managed to get the three points was by being slightly less crap than them. 3-0 was a result he could live without being enthusiastic.
Talking of crap, I have to say that the strangest traffic solutions I’ve ever seen were on Polish territory. There is a main north-south link road, akin to a British dual carriageway, on which traffic travels at an average speed of around 120 km, which is OK. What is not OK is the fact that there are non-signposted zebra crossings that simply appear behind the next hill. Nobody in Poland stops for people at zebra crossings; if anything they hit the accelerator to send out an acoustic warning to get out of the fucking way. There were old people, mothers with kiddy cars, and little children without parents – all trying to cross the road – but there are no traffic lights!
Then there’s this mind-blowingly ridiculous system they’ve invented for roads coming to the carriageway at right angles. They simply cut gaps in the crash barriers between the two sides of the road. If a car wants to turn right off the main road, it simply slows down and waits in the gap. If a second car comes on the main road and wants to wait in the gap and sees the first car is still there, it has to wait in the right-hand lane of the main road! Cars wanting to cross from left to right just have to shoot across and hope there’s no-one coming on the far side of the dual carriageway, which they can’t see properly because of the barriers. It’s a recipe for high speed death.
Anyway, now you’re almost up to date.
