“It’s 7am,” said Big
Kev with a grave look on his face. “We’ve missed our flight.”
I sat up with a jolt
in my hotel bed. At first I thought he was joking. A quick look at the clock on
my phone confirmed he wasn’t.
It was the morning of
the Champions League Final in Rome and our connecting flight from Frankfurt had left the German metropolis some 50 minutes earlier.
Having attended 45 out
of the previous 65 Manchester United fixtures, the big final in Rome against
Barcelona was supposed to be the icing on the cake.
We’d chanced our arm
and booked flights to Rome via Frankfurt for next to nothing while United were at
the quarter-final stage and it was in a sweaty Frankfurt hotel room at the airport
where we now found ourselves.
We’d only gone out for
a quick drink in the local pub. This was until a bevy of Scandinavian beauties
decided to join us. Turning out to be hostesses from Ryanair they were up for a
party and at the time it just seemed plain rude to turn them down.
While Jason, our third
travelling companion sat in a chair struggling to come to terms with news I
leapt out of bed and attempted to formulate a plan.
We found the Ryanair
desk and tried to book another flight. There was one available but it landed ten
minutes after kick off. No dice. The only alternative was a hire car. We
Google-mapped the route and discovered that Rome was a 12-hour drive away. We
had 13 hours to play with. This could work.
A deposit was laid
down on a VW Golf and we set off at breakneck speed onto the German autobahns
where apparently anything went speed-wise. While half of me feared we’d crash,
the other half was firmly focused on the task in hand.
We soon realised that
Germany is massive. Town after town passed by until we reached the Swiss border
where the roads suddenly became beautifully smooth and the scenery idyllic. We
were doing well for time and our friends at home were eagerly tracking our
progress from workplaces across the north west.
The picture postcard
Swiss landscape got hillier and the Alps soon came into view. Crossing
mountains limited our speeds especially through tunnels that were up to 20km in
length.
At 5pm we dropped into
Italy and cleared Milan in rush hour. So far, so good. An hour south however
and our worst nightmare came true. There’d been a huge car crash and the
tailbacks stretched out as far as the eye could see.
Italians were getting
out of their cars and convening on the hard shoulder. It spelled disaster. Game
over. We sat in the traffic for two hours before it started moving again ever
so slowly.
With only half an hour
to go until kick off we gave up pulled off the motorway with our tails between
our legs into the first town, which happened to be Piacenza.
It was the world’s
worst hangover multiplied by a million. We were devastated. A local restaurant
took pity on us when we showed them our match tickets and let us in to watch
the game.
To add insult to
injury United were severely outclassed on the pitch and lost the match without
so much as a whimper. The restaurant’s chefs laughed as we headed back on the
return journey. With no accommodation booked we decided to stop off at the
highest point in the Swiss Alps and slept in the back of the hire car.
The only good to come
of this sorry saga were the laughs it brought as my best man recalled it in his
speech at my wedding two years later. I sometimes think back to it and think
that maybe it was a blessing that United lost. If they’d have won I’d have
probably have had to move to the moon…or maybe the Swiss Alps. I hear they’re
lovely in May.
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