What’s the score? The perils of keeping up with your team while travelling


It’s Saturday. It’s 5 o’clock. And I’m stuck in some far flung corner of Europe. Ok not exactly stuck, but far from the familiar tune of BBC Sports Report and any other access to the football scores.

Those sports fans over the age of 30 will recognise this scenario. In the days before mobile internet and SMS, getting the final scores was not easy. If you weren’t prepared to make a long-distance phone call (very expensive) you would have to wait till the Sunday papers reached you: only a day or two if you were in Spain, but in less travelled corners of the world it could take several days to read about the results. And even then you would run the gauntlet of abuse, as shop owners were typically not amused by a stingy foreigner who would flick through the back pages of his English papers and not spend any money.

Occasionally they would feature the English top flight in the local papers, and sometimes even with a report. Parts of Africa and South America were great for this. But of course that’s no good if your team is out of the elite, and then you have to resort to more direct action. As a long-suffering Nottingham Forest fan who loves to travel, my parents got used to the phone call on a Saturday, which went something like “Hello it’s me, everything’s ok, I haven’t got long, this call is really expensive, what did Forest do?” The worst I got stung for that was $18 in a hut in rural Malawi – and only to learn they’d lost 3-1.

One person I encountered (a Wednesday fan) carried a short wave radio with him, and we spent a happy morning on a train in Mongolia, armed with local brew, listening to the pleasingly familiar sound of BBC World Service deliver the classified results.

Life is so much easier now. Internet cafes everywhere, 3G modems and text alerts all allow you not only to find out the score at 5pm, but even to follow the match in progress just as you would at home. I have sat in the back of a car in India and kept the driver, who was a die-hard Man Utd fan (what else would you expect?) fully informed of their progress in a Champions League match. And then there’s TV coverage of English games which you can catch in any corner of the world.

America is often the hardest place to catch a live game. I was there at a conference during the 2002 World Cup, and finding an illicit back room bar in Philadelphia that was showing England v Sweden at 5am felt like a throwback to prohibition days. When their own country reached the quarter finals it only made the final story on the sports round-up, after the college basketball news.

Of course it’s better in one way. No more expensive calls or long waits now to find out the news (which let’s face it, for a Forest fan is rarely good). But there is a nostalgic part of me that misses the thrill of the quest to find a way to get the scores on a Saturday night, wherever in the world I might be at that time.

{lang: 'en-GB'}

Author Information

No comments yet.

Leave a Reply