WITH TEAMS HEADING home from the Euros, journalists have to reckon with the realities of staying on at a month-long tournament.
I check out of my Dusseldorf AirBnB on Sunday, which means I am in a kind of stand-off with the owner over the rapidly dwindling stock of toilet roll. With the final roll winnowed close to its cardboard bone and the owner expressing no interest in replacing it, I’m rationing it in the hope I can get to Sunday without needing to buy the four-roll-minimum pack available in the nearest shop. The nation holds its breath.
I’ve already bought detergent and bin bags, so I’ve figured it’s finally time to draw the line.
Uefa don’t accredit me for a game on Monday, so I decide to put my surprise free time to good use, and do some laundry. The AirBnB owner has told me that the building can only be operated using specific tokens, which have to be bought from the janitor, a man whose existence remained a rumour for my first fortnight here. I’ve generally been arriving home from games at around 3am and leaving at around noon in a pre-emptive strike against the Deutsche-Bahn, which are not janitor-amenable hours.
I find him on this day, however, and pay him for a single token. (Reader: if you’re wondering why I’d be so stingy as to pay for just a single token, I re-direct you to the earlier paragraph about toilet roll.)
I find two machines in the basement, one of which was in use. I bundle my clothes into the empty drum but am then bewildered by the German instructions on the face of the machine. I figure ‘express’ looks a solid option, and click that. I return 38 minutes later to find my dirty clothes still dirty, but bone dry. I’ve wasted my single token on a dryer.
Demoralised, I scoop up my clothes and go looking for the janitor to buy another token. He’s gone home. Great.
I have an early train to Leipzig on Tuesday morning for Austria v Turkiye, and I buy a couple of new t-shirts once I get there, remembering the good-sense economics of scrimping on washing machine tokens. (There’s an allegory for Germany’s lack of infrastructure investment in there somewhere.)
Eagle-eyed readers will realise that the opening pars to my piece from Austria/Turkiye had a surprising amount of washing machine-based imagery – this is what we call displacement.
Still, my mood is improved by the sheer smugness of correctly predicting that Austria/Turkiye would be worth going to: it proved as wild and anarchic as I thought it might. The slight downside is the fact the press box in Leipzig is in the lower tier of the stand, which leaves us vulnerable to anything falling from above. Hence one of my new t-shirts is soaked in celebratory Turkish beer. I cannot sustain this level of attrition.
My general mood collapses the next morning when Uefa politely email to say my applications for Germany/Spain and England/Switzerland could not be accepted. Fuck!
Germany/Spain has a naturally high demand and is being held in one of the smaller venues, Stuttgart, so I can understand being too far down the priority list. I apply for the waiting list for France/Portugal on the same night, but I am not holding my breath.
But England? Do they not know that one of our national sports is Hoping England Lose?
Being a football journalist without any football to cover is, of course, an existential issue, and it throws up several problems. What is the point of being here? Am I just going to be covering this tournament off the TV? And, if so, how the hell will my toilet roll ration plan deal with this unplanned increase in AirBnB dwell time?
I fire off several emails to Uefa, missives of anger leavened with a dollop of self-pity. I spend Wednesday evening sitting in front of my laptop, desperately refreshing my emails. All of a sudden I feel there’s a massive party going on around me, to which I’m not invited. The non-Euros sporting landscape is bleak: I flick on Eurosport Deutschland and find they are showing a full repeat of the 2024 world snooker final.
I sleep uneasily through Wednesday night but wake up on Thursday determined to do something. I go out to the media accreditation centre in Dusseldorf, with a vague sense that I’ll tell someone that I won’t leave until I have answers, goddammit. This kind of assertiveness doesn’t come easily to me but desperate times will change a man.
I wargame it all out in my head as I walk to the centre. Start out reasonable, polite. Don’t want to charge in too hot. Mention the stress and the uncertainty and my sunken costs.
If I’m getting nowhere with a Perhaps you can help me I’ll elevate things to a You have to help me.
Level three will be a I demand to speak to your supervisor. I’ve worked in pubs and restaurants in the past so I really don’t want to go there. But again, desperate times. But if that fails, I realise I have no level four. What the hell am I going to do? Chain myself to the railings? Channel the proud tradition of peaceful political protest for the right to see Kieran Trippier?
As it turns out, I don’t need to stray beyond level one. There has been an error of some kind, as there are available seats, and I’m assigned one following a bit of communication with Uefa’s media operations division.
I get a true rush of exhilaration. I have actually managed to stop cowering behind my screen and act in the real world. I’ve actually managed to resolve a problem face-to-face. Is this how it felt to be a hunter-gatherer?
Now convinced once again of my brilliance, I figure, ‘Fuck it, let’s go to Stuttgart.’ I haven’t been assigned a seat at Germany/Spain, but now that I seem to possess some kind of genius for Figuring Things Out, I bet I can rock up on the day and charm someone into allowing me in off the back of someone’s cancellation.
My momentum carries me to Dusseldorf station, where it’s interrupted by a two-hour delay to my train. I check my email for word on any cancellation backdoor to France/Portugal in Hamburg, but there’s nothing. I quietly surrender that plan when I step onto the train bound for Stuttgart.
The closer I get to Stuttgart, the less convinced I am about my plan. How many cancellations are there really likely to be for the game of the tournament? Especially one featuring the hosts? By the time we pull into Stuttgart, I am convinced I’m heading for another heroic Irish defeat here.
I check into my hotel, allegedly in Stuttgart but so far west of the city that it might be in France.
Around 9pm, with my plans now sitting queasily in my stomach, I check my phone: an email from Uefa to say there’s been a cancellation and I’m approved for France/Portugal.
Fuck!
Now I have less than 24 hours to get myself 650km north to Hamburg. I show a pathetic lack of loyalty to my Stuttgart plan in dropping it right away, and I book an early-morning train to Hamburg. Just another six hours on the Deutsche-Bahn. It means in the space of just over 48 hours I’ll have gone from Leipzig to Dusseldorf to Stuttgart to Hamburg. That’s more than 1500km of German railway track and a truly unhealthy level of Deutsche-Bahn exposure.
The reasons for delays I’ve encountered en route: Unauthorised Persons on the Tracks; Police Incident on The Train; Technical Issue on the Train; Delay of an Earlier Train; Slippery Earth Close To The Tracks.
But I cope with them all because this is my life now. I eat on the Deutsche-Bahn; I sleep on the Deutsche-Bahn; I book Deutsche-Bahn tickets on the Deutsche-Bahn; I write snide things about the Deutsche-Bahn on the Deutsche-Bahn.
The distinction between me and the Deutsche-Bahn is breaking down. I’m reminded of Flann O’Brien writing about bicycles.
People who spend most of their natural lives riding iron bicycles over the rocky roadsteads of this parish get their personalities mixed up with the personalities of their bicycle as a result of the interchanging of the atoms of each of them, and you would be surprised at the number of people in these parts who nearly are half people and half bicycles…and you would be flabbergasted at the number of bicycles that are half human, almost half man, half partaking of humanity.
Swap in the Deutsche-Bahn and I fear this is happening to me. (Your diary pieces are already arriving late – Editor.)
I write this shortly before I arrive into Hamburg, for a Euros quarter-final that will pass the time until my return Deutsche-Bahn to Dusseldorf.
I have just come back from the bathroom, where I sat and beheld the seat-high stack of ample toilet roll. Perhaps this new me isn’t all bad.
