An Eejit Abroad

Sydney 2-0 Central Coast Mariners Att: 12,768 Awful first half in this A-League game but Sydney looked a lot better after the break and should really have won by more. Short-term covid era Aberdeen player Ryan Edmondson was the only SPFL connection in this one, I reckon. Really nice modern stadium though the pitch itself looks exactly what you’d expect of a surface that hosts three codes of football during the season. Decent atmosphere, particularly considering the place was more than half-empty, and CCM brought a decent away support. Great Northern is an underrated beer too - perfect for a warm NSW evening.

Manhattan Kickers 0-0 New York Ukrainians Att: ~30 First random game since the first day of the year as I managed to get along to a Cosmopolitan Soccer League game on Randalls Island in New York on one of those perfect days of weather you can get in NYC in the three weeks between the baltic winter and the horribly humid summer. The CSL has been running since the 1920s and was originally a league for German immigrants. It has expanded its scope since but is still mainly made up of teams founded by local immigrant communities, such as the NY Ukrainians who were formed just after WWII (Kickers aren’t one of those clubs as they were formed as a scouts team or something in the 70s). The standard tends to be decent enough although more professional and semi-professional teams playing in the NY metro area has diluted the quality a little at this level. Randalls Island is my least favourite of the CSL venues I’ve been to. It’s an absolute ballache to get to from anywhere in the city other than Harlem and the very upper Upper East Side and there’s really not a lot worth doing once you get there, unless you’re checking in to the rehab centre or doing firefighter training. The pitches are also all bunched together so half the game is spent kicking balls from other games off the pitch. But it’s still a pretty stunning setting, being on an island in the East River between the Bronx, Manhattan, and Queens and with the Triborough and Hell Gate bridges running above it. Game wasn’t great. My pictures are worse. Bonus Acela heading towards Boston for the train folks.

Queens Park Rangers 1-2 Cardiff City Att: 16,849 Flights home direct from Scotland were extortionate which gave me the opportunity to get to my first game of 2024 and tick off my sixth ground in London. A lovely old ground. Absolutely no leg room though which made for a less than comfortable watch. Poor atmosphere for the most part although Cardiff had brought a big away support. A boy down the front of my section had a sombrero, horn and old rattle which amusingly seemed to wind up the Cardiff fans. Lyndon Dykes was the single most obvious Scottish football link in this game as Rangers legend Aaron Ramsey was missing for Cardiff. A pretty poor standard overall and QPR are unsurprisingly looking like relegation candidates.

Tranent 0-1 Civil Service Strollers First time at Foresters Park in 13 years. A very well drilled Strollers side came away with the win after a second half penalty. A nice wee ground. First post-pandemic bovril for me too.

Genoa 1-1 Empoli Att: 31,797 Fascinating city, brilliant old dump of a ground, great atmosphere, decent enough game, wild boar twenty yards from the stadium. Good way to finish a big birthday year of overseas football I’ll likely never beat.

Monza 1-2 Juventus Att: 15,148 There are some good players in this Juventus team but on this showing they are anything but a good team. Having taken the lead in the first half they spent most of the second camped in their own box. Monza equalized in injury time before Juventus did show some mettle by getting a very late winner. Monza very much hard done by in this one. Bit of a strange environment with much of the non-curva home end full of Juventus fans. Did we give the local Juventus fans a bit of a hard time when Monza scored? Yes. Did that come back to haunt us almost immediately? Also yes. Another nice old town though and no sign of Berlusconi’s influence at all. Monza is only 15 minutes from Milan Centrale so very handy for anyone in town and looking for some football. The stadium is a very pleasant half hour walk from the train station.

Atalanta 1-1 Sporting Att: 14,865 Europa League tie in Bergamo. Both teams needed a draw to go through and after about an hour they decided that is what they were going to settle for. Decent enough game up until that point. Great atmosphere despite one end of the stadium being closed for renovation. The curva was in full flow and the 750 Sporting fans stuck in a temporary stand also made plenty of noise. There were plenty of them in town too and the ones we chatted to were pleasant. Bergamo is a lovely town and well worth a visit, even when hit with very Scottish weather as we were. Plenty of bars and restaurants and a great old town up the hill which you can reach by funicular. The Gewiss Stadium is also home to the best Burger King I’ve ever had - a fantastic Italian culinary experience.

Milan 1-0 Fiorentina Att: 73,074 Fiorentina should really have got something out of what was a very scrappy game. Francesco Camarda became the youngest player to ever play in Serie A when Milan brought him on during the second half. He was born in 2008… I’d previously wondered why there was talk of Inter and Milan moving out of such an iconic stadium. I don’t wonder why now. I don’t think you could build a stadium which is less aimed at making the fan experience comfortable. A nightmare to get out of and a nightmare to get to a toilet. Fantastic atmosphere though and even more spectacular a building in person than it looks on tv. A great experience for a child of Football Italia.

Northern Virginia 0-1 Christos; Att: ~88 US Open Cup fourth qualifying round tie between Northern Virginia of Leesburg, Virginia and Christos of Baltimore, Maryland. The game was played at Segra Park, home of second tier Loudoun United. Both teams have been among the best amateur clubs in the country in recent times but this was a bit of a scrappy one. The officiating didn’t help. Christos now go into the draw for the first round proper of the 2024 tournament which will be played in March. This is the first time I’ve managed all of the qualifying rounds of the Open Cup. The dream of getting to every round of the 2024 version is still alive but they’ve announced that all games for the rest of the tournament will be played midweek. So I’ll need the localish teams to me to go on some good runs and even then I can already see a midweek in May where I’m probably going to be unable to get to a game due to work. We’ll see how it goes.

Honestly basically anywhere in Manhattan south of 96th street where you can get a hotel will be better than Times Square, which is objectively the worst place on the planet. Unfortunately - or fortunately if you are a local - most of the hotels are in parts of town that aren’t necessarily the bits you’ll want to spend time in outside of the touristy stuff. I’d generally say that anywhere between 41st street and 14th street (excluding anywhere around Port Authority) is a good area to be situated because you’ll have good transport links to everything that isn’t walkable. If you can get something in the Village then you’ll be laughing but there aren’t too many hotels there, as far as I’m aware.

My experience of the bigger clubs in Belgium is that they relax the rules on getting tickets when the teams aren’t performing. When I was over there it was easy to get tickets for Club Brugge but difficult to get them for Anderlecht and Standard without a membership. Gent is infinitely better than Brugge as a city.

Watching this game on a constantly buffering BBC stream might actually be purgatory. And yet here I am, committing to watching another 30+ minutes of it.

DC United 2-1 Medeama Ghana was the focus of the inaugural Africa Week Festival in Washington DC this year and to finish off the week the reigning Ghanaian champions Medeama travelled to face DC United. The home side missed out on the play-offs and parted ways with their little known English manager, Wayne Rooney, last week. The US showed their ongoing high regard for both Africa and football by not granting visas to a significant number of Medeama players and officials. Despite all of that, it was a very decent game with what was left of the Medeama squad clearly taking it very seriously and probably unlucky to lose on the day. I managed to pick up a ticket for $10 (around £8.25 nowadays) which was pretty good value for an opportunity to see an African club live for the first time. A not too bad crowd turned up considering how little Americans tend to be bothered about actually seeing interesting sides - but give them 2 EPL reserve teams playing at walking pace and charge them $100 and you'll get a good 60,000. Medeama apparently come from a town of around 35,000 people. So if anyone can get a Falkirk or Queen of the South or Motherwell or whoever over for New York Tartan Week or similar nonsense then I might actually bother to join those celebrations for once.

Arlington SA 2-3 Yinz United Att: ~40 Second qualifying round of the US Open Cup about 100 yards from the Pentagon in Arlington, VA. Arlington SA are a local academy and have had players go on to play for the US national team. Yinz United are from Maryland though their name and colours betray links to Pittsburgh/Western Pennsylvania. Decent enough game on an awful plastic pitch covered in Boeing branding - the company’s new HQ is next door. The pictures I took were awful even by my standards but it was quite a nice setting for a game, with the Potomac River, railway and airport on one side and the Pentagon on the other.

DCFC 1-0 MoCo 1776; Att: ~25 I saw a big groundhog on the way to this game, which was fitting as for the second year in a row I was heading to DCFC’s US Open Cup first qualifying round tie and for the second year in a row the kickoff time i’d seen online was wrong. An added thunderstorm delay meant that I couldn’t stay for much of this one but what I did see was decent enough entertainment. MoCo - from the Maryland suburbs of Washington - seem to have started the game with 10 men for some reason but gave a decent account of themselves. I managed to do every round of the Scottish Cup in 14/15 and have been hoping to do every round of the US Open Cup since I moved here. The geography of the country, travel costs, midweek rounds and the local(ish) teams getting knocked out early each year have made it impossible so far but I live in hope for 2024. Interestingly, the first qualifier for next year’s edition was played before the final of the 2023 edition. The game was played on the pitches next to the rusting skeleton of the old RFK Stadium. There’s talk of a new stadium being built on the site - the city seems more open to it now that the local NFL team have followed up getting rid of their racist nickname with getting rid of their scumbag owner - but in the meantime it’s a nice backdrop for games.