Liverpool Game

After flying from Lisbon to Barcelona, we spent an uneventful night in a pretty ordinary hostel in Barcelona - great location but not much opportunity to meet people, so we had an early night. The next day we caught the train to our hostel in Valencia, where we discovered that our tickets (which we had paid EUR 170 each for) had never arrived. Bugger. We're not sure if the site was a scam or what, but Dane is giving them a chance to make reparations before reversing the credit card transaction. Having made it this far, we caught the train to Vila-Real anyway, intending to scalp tickets. On the way there we met a nice lady from Vila-Real by the name of Amelia, who spoke English and helped us out a lot with various things, driving us to the stadium and calling a taxi for us in Spanish afterwards. On getting to the stadium we discovered that there were still plenty of tickets on sale, even though pre-match publicity had said that it was sold out. We scalped a couple of tickets from a Liverpool supporter anyway, for half price of 40 EUR, but then discovered that they were in different sections, so we shelled out another 80 EUR for another ticket in the same section, so we ended up paying 80 each anyway. This was a lot better than the 170 each we paid to the scalping site, but we had no way of knowing we didn't have to do that.

Vila-Real is a town of less than 50,000 people which somehow manages to support a football team which probably ranks in the top 5 in La Liga in Spain. The stadium was smallish - a 25,000 capacity - which was good since we were up close and personal with the players. The game itself was a bit lacklustre, which was to be expected - it was a friendly, and though I think Vilareal mostly ran their top team, Liverpool took the opportunity to give their young kids a run. They did play the new striker Keane for the whole of the first half though. By the way, at Barcelona-Sants train station, we saw three Liverpool fans who were already wearing the official number 7 Keane shirt, even though he only signed to the club a day or two earlier. Crazy.

The player everyone wanted to see was Fernando Torres, Liverpool's premier striker. He started warming up on the sidelines in front of us midway through the second half, accompanied by cheers and whispers from the Spanish crowd of his Spanish nickname "El Nino". He was instrumental in Spain's win in the Euro Cup this year and is therefore loved throughout Spain even though he now plays for an English club. To give a sense of how valuable he was in his debut season for Liverpool, a passable strike rate for a striker is 1 goal per 3 appearances and a good striker scores 1 goal per 2 appearances. Torres, in his first season in the Premier League, scored 33 goals in 46 appearances, and has replaced the captain Stephen Gerrard as the most popular player among fans. He only played around the last 15 minutes and despite one good opportunity was unable to break the scoring drought. The game ended nil all.

Dane and I will probably spend tonight in the hostel bar, then tomorrow I fly to Split, Croatia via Rome, and he flies back to London. I'm joining my 8-day sailing tour of Croatia tomorrow, so there will be an internet drought. More after that.