World Cup: Beer, Bare Bellies and Beckham
England Stagger into Quarter-Finals
The coat of arms for the city of Stuttgart shows a black horse rearing up on a yellow background.
After the hooligan trouble - always such an enchanting feature of the undercard to a big match - that flared on the eve of England's win against Ecuador yesterday afternoon, there was some suggestion that it might be temporarily appropriate for the crest to be changed to depict an England fan rampant, wielding a cafeteria chair high above his head.
Naturally, such behaviour Shames Us All, and Stuttgart's Fan Fest enclosure probably benefited from the absence of the 500 fans still under arrest or banned from the city centre after their furniture-based fun.
And however much of a no-brainer it may sound, the removal of all plastic chairs from Schlossplatz, the central square, was a stroke of genius by some security mastermind or other.
After all, given that this is a venue where a pint of water costs €5.50 and a pint of beer €4, you could argue that getting steadily drunk was an economising measure.
On the stage at the front of the square, a German master of ceremonies in an England shirt didn't have the best of starts to his warm up. "Hello United Kingdom!" he called gamely, enticing bellows of derision from various sections athered to watch the game on the big screens.
"England, you kraut muppet!" screeched one gentleman in tones so furiously offended one might fancy the MC had just made a particularly off-colour joke about his mother.
Straining tightly across his upper body was a T-shirt reading "10 German bombers in the air ... and the RAF from Pompey shot them down". Ah, revisionist historians ... You can't beat them, can you? Pity.
"We are wishing England the best of luck, too," the MC ploughed on, too far away to spot this visual reminder of the part Harry Redknapp's boys played in the war effort. "Even though Michael Owen is not playing."
"Owen isn't playing?" a crestfallen young man cloaked in an England flag remarked of his companion.
You do have to wonder about the psychology of someone who travels hundreds of miles at considerable financial cost to watch a football match, but appears bewilderingly unaware of the fact that the England striker knackered his knee five days ago and was doubtless watching the game back home.
Still, his friend was clad in that rarest of spots, an Owen Hargreaves replica shirt, which means your correspondent's tally is now just one Walcott short of a full set. Like Pokemon characters, you gotta catch 'em all.
"There won't be any more trouble," predicted 32 year-old Newcastle engineer Chris Lamb, who had travelled without a ticket and found the German hospitality extremely generous.
"Once the match starts", continued his friend, Andrew Humble, an accountant from Middlesbrough, "this will all settle."
After the chaotic build up, there is something mesmeric about the effect of the starting whistle on these venues.
A group of English fans in full St George costumes (complete with nylon silver chainmail) who three minutes before kick-off had been giving their rousing renditions of Three Lions were suddenly held in desperate, silent thrall to the screens.
Not that you can keep everybody down. One clique of fans had positioned themselves, accompanied by an inflatable doll, right in the vanguard and kept to a rigid schedule of singing "No surrender to the IRA" every five minutes.
Towards the back of the square, there was a distinct Mad Max flavour to the supporters who had colonised a bandstand, and hung off its wrought iron balustrades shouting advice to the teams in the stadium some miles away, including an early "take Beckham off".
Popular points of debate were also which players were not overly exerting themselves in the cause of bringing football home, and who might benefit from a kick to the backside.
There wasn't the most enormous amount of love for Beckham, it had to be said, until the 60th minute, of course, when his free kick put England ahead and all earlier suggestions were retracted without irony.
Not the best time for the giant televisions to go on the blink, perhaps, but the second they flickered back into life a hundred €4 beers were cast skywards.
Cut to the shot of the tradtionally stony-faced Victoria Beckham leaping to her feet in the stands. "At last!" cackled an English fan. "She's only bloody smiling!"
Incidentally, it wouldn't be a World Cup 2006 Fan Fest if we didn't take a reading on the tournament's trademarked slogan, "A time to make friends".
At the back of the enclosure, one Englishman hoisted a young Ecuadorian boy on his shoulders, the better to see the action, while cigarettes were shared between fans of both sides as the English confided their fears over Steve McClaren's impending tenure as England manager to their Ecuadorian opposite numbers, presumably to keep their minds off the tension.
But at long last the wait was over, and the square rang once again to the lusty voiced assertion that football's coming home. "It's coming home, it's coming home ..."
Well, at the very least, it's started to think about getting its things together.
