On The Spot


 
Follow PWC columnist Paul Marcuccitti's World Cup diary as he travels around Germany.

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The white house and the non-talking horse



June 11th, 2006

    I had a bit to do today. First, I left Cologne. Frankfurt will be my base for the next two weeks. No more leaving hotels two or three days after arriving (not for a while anyway).

    After arriving in Frankfurt, I dropped my bags at the hotel and then went back to Frankfurt’s main train station which is just two hundred metres away.

    The reason I returned was so that I could pick up match tickets. I had to go to a hotel in Frankfurt’s airport to get the tickets that I’d ordered through Football Federation Australia.

    In fact, I was really picking up vouchers. A voucher is not a ticket – but I can turn these vouchers into tickets if Australia progresses through the World Cup’s knockout phase. So folks, I will have a category 1 ticket for the World Cup Final ..... if Australia makes it. If the Socceroos are eliminated in the group phase these vouchers will be useless.

    Before returning to my new base, I also needed to pick up tickets that I scored through FIFA. They were allocated to me after it was too late for them to be mailed out.

    The FIFA tickets are for Tunisia v Saudi Arabia and Paraguay v Trinidad & Tobago. I received an email telling me that I could get a Paraguay v Trinidad & Tobago ticket just this morning.

    You can either pick those FIFA tickets up at the relevant stadium on match day or from any World Cup stadium before match day.

    I have already seen the long lines for ticket pick ups on match days and I’d rather not have to do it then thanks.

    Unfortunately the Frankfurt World Cup ticket centre isn’t exactly at the stadium. And at the stadium I got terrible directions.

    A chap told me to walk down a particular road until I found a “white house” and that house would be the ticket centre.

    Ben, my room mate for the next two weeks, decided that he’d accompany me to pick these tickets up and he must have been wondering why he did when we found ourselves walking down a road through a forest. (OK, if it isn’t a forest outside the stadium, it’s at least a big park with a lot of tall trees.)

    We found a white house and wandered down its driveway. I could smell something odd – something I wasn’t expecting. Soon I realised that Ben and I were on a small farm and we came face to face with a horse.

    I like horses but I didn’t expect that this horse could either talk or give me World Cup tickets. A nice lady could see that we were lost. She knew nothing about a World Cup ticketing centre so we moved on.

    We quickly realised that nearly all the houses on this road were white and I was tempted to walk back to the stadium, find the man that gave me directions, and talk to him about the dangers of substance abuse.

    Eventually we came to an intersection. By now I had decided to ask for help as I had the ticketing centre’s address. (Now you might be wondering why I didn’t just look for the address in the first place. It’s because we’ve been fed a constant diet of information about picking tickets up from stadiums so it’s reasonable to think that all these centres are part of the stadium complex.)

    Fortunately, when we got to the intersection, we saw a young lad holding World Cup tickets.

    Bingo. He had just been to the ticketing centre. (And, yeah, it’s white but it sure doesn’t look like a house.)

    The next bit of entertainment was standing in the queue. When I joined the line to get into the elusive ticket centre, it was at least 50 meters long. Worse still, everyone in the line was exposed to the warm sun – there was no shade.

    I didn’t get my tickets for 40 minutes and this meant that I would miss watching the telecast of the first half of the Serbia & Montenegro v Netherlands match.

    That was disappointing (I especially wore my orange shirt today) but I did, at least, see Arjen Robben score the only goal of the game on the television inside the ticketing centre.

    I was in my hotel room just in time for the second half and I stayed in the room for most of the rest of the day and watched Mexico defeat Iran and then Overrated FC scored the only goal of its game against Angola.

    It would have been more fun watching those matches in the city – there’s a big screen at the nearby main train station. But I really needed to look after other things today. I had to get all my tickets and papers into order and wash clothes.

    I particularly needed to make sure that one of my gold Australian shirts is ready for tomorrow because the Socceroos will kick off their World Cup finals campaign against Japan.

    This is a day I’ve been waiting 24 years for. The first World Cup I watched was Spain 1982 and I remember thinking how nice it would be to see Australia in the tournament (I was only a few months old when the Socceroos played in the 1974 finals).

    So if we get a good result tomorrow, I hope you’ll forgive me if my next diary entry is late. I might have to do the honourable thing and party long and hard into the night in Kaiserslautern.

Come on Australia.



 
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