sarahx

Argentina 6 Serbia & Montenegro 0
16 June 2006

Schalke's stadium at Gelsenkirchen is, not to put too fine a point on it, magnificent. The roof closes, the pitch rolls outside so it can get proper light and rain to ensure the grass grows properly, and the noise with the roof shut is astonishing. Add to that the fact that Argentina scored six good goals - including one absolute cracker - and I left Gelsenkirchen with happy memories of the stadium.

The loos were impressive, too, both in quantity and quality.
Six cubicles one side...


...and six on the other meant not a queue in sight, even at half time.


Inside, they were clean, spacious and had lots of loo roll.


Score: 8.5/10. Top stadium, top loos, top match!

Barcelona 2 Espanyol 0
6 May 2006

I got lucky with the footy fixtures on my Barcelona trip: not only did I get to go to the Olympic Stadium for the Espanyol home game, three days later Barcelona were at home at the Nou Camp, ironically to Espanyol. They'd also won the championship midweek, so there was a rather fine party after the match. Fireworks, the lot. Top stuff.

The Nou Camp is the biggest footy stadium in Europe, holding nigh on 90,000 fans. Unsurprisingly, it's a touch vertiginous near the top where the cheap seats are (though at €58 for a second-lowest price ticket, 'cheap' is relative!).


Being at the top of a big stadium means having to climb lots of steps to get up there, and there were toilets on several stair landings. However, none of them were particularly big, this one near the top with a mere two cubicles being typical.


The cubicle I used was fairly large, though this was more a result of strange room layout than actual design. An abundance of loo rolls!


Half-an-hour before kick-off, there weren't any queues. At half time, they were prohibitively long. They weren't much better after the match as we waited for the championship-winning party.

Rating: 5/10. Clean enough but definitely inadequate in number.

The Windsor Castle, Crawford Place, Marylebone
1 May 2006

My friend Ian has this knack for tracking down strange pubs and restaurants. And this one is no exception. It has a spectacular quantity of royal memorabilia absolutely everywhere. Plates. Cups. Tankards. Tea caddies. Photographs. And photographs all over the ceiling of members of the Handlebar Club, who meet on the first Friday of every month. They all have extremely impressive facial hair. I must go back there on one of their meeting nights to admire it.

Anyway, with all that royal memorabilia, the loos were guaranteed to be interesting. Marvellously geriatric green tiles all over, which the flash-free mobile phone camera doesn't even remotely do justice to.


And the best bit...... there was a Charles & Di engagement teatowel on the wall. Words failed me at that point. It was just so....... horrid!


Score: 5/10. Dark, dingy, only one cubicle, but that tea towel.... fantastic!

Brighton & Hove Albion 0 Sheffield Wednesday 2
17 April 2006

The last time Sheffield Wednesday played at Brighton on an Easter Monday – three years ago – we were relegated. A win for us this time would repay the compliment. Needless to say, beer flavoured pre-match anaesthetic was much needed. Amazingly, we won. And we're not relegated. Hurrah! Yes, I might just have ended up back in the pub afterwards. Rude not to.

Thanks to a crook of an ex-chairman, who sold their old ground for development without actually sorting out a replacement ground, they play at the Withdean athletics stadium. It's a very nice athletics stadium. And a very rubbish football stadium. The away fans are now housed at the opposite end of the stadium from where we were on our last visit, as they've put yet another temporary stand up, behind the hammer circle. This raises the capacity to a staggeringly huge 8,000. And gives the away fans a pretty shockingly distant view of the match.


Temporary stands mean temporary toilets, and I wasn't disappointed. The ladies' is the third door from the left.


It looked like there were three cubicles...


But no. The one on the left had a rather attractive trough in it. Yep, it was a gents' loo in disguise as a ladies. And the queues for the two remaining actual loos was rather long.


The cubicles were OK, I suppose, and at least there was loo roll.


Score: 3/10. Not enough cubicles. Though I guess the sight of the trough was educational.

London Hibs 1 Norwich City 0
26 March 2006

As a cup semifinal this was always going to be a bit tasty.... And, despite allegedly retiring a couple of years ago, John Leslie (or, as the tabloids insist on calling him, 'sex and drugs shame John Leslie') was in the Hibs goal, even though yesterday's Sun said he'd flogged his London houses and moved back to his mum's in Edinburgh as he's skint.

I was running the line, and fortunately the worst of the misbehaviour happened at the end where I wasn't. Even more fortunately, as the heavens opened just after the final whistle, it didn't go to extra time, thanks to one of the Norwich players squandering a golden chance right at the end. It was very overcast, though – it's maybe five minutes as the jet flies from Heathrow, but the clouds were so low that the planes thundering overhead could only be heard, not seen.

Yet more proof that footballers are stupid, mind – the Norwich players bellyached at me that the Hibs goal was offside. One of their defenders was on the goal line with the keeper. And they say girls don't know the offside rule? Go figure.

I had the whole of the ladies' changing area to myself – two changing rooms, eight showers and five loos. More than enough for little ol' me.


It was lovely and warm – the heating's obviously still on full thermonuclear for the January temperatures we've been having recently, and hadn't been turned down to complement the more temperate level it was today. Very lovely. That's the Civil Service for you.

The loos were reasonably clean, and lots of loo roll. There was even a choice of paper towels or pointless hot air dryer!


However, the cleaners clearly don't look very closely – there were loads of mud spatters down the outside of the cubicle nearest the sink, where people had cleaned their boots (naughty, naughty). It's evidently not on their list of things to clean, so they didn't. Hmmm.

Score: 7.5/10. More than adequate.

Cardiff City 1 Sheffield Wednesday 0
4 March 2006

Another match, another defeat. I shouldn't be entirely surprised at that. We lose regularly. That's because we're rubbish. In the second half we had much the best of it (to the extent that their goalie was man-of-the-match), but in reality we never looked like scoring.

And it was bloody freezing.

Ninian Park is showing its age. Old, battered, and still has a terrace. Must be the only ground left in the division where standing's still allowed.

The loos pretty much matched. Only three cubicles, and the inevitable queues built up.


They had had a coat of paint recently though, so looked cared for. Bit untidy, even before the match, but there was loads of loo roll.


It had possibly the oddest flush I've ever seen.


A pull chain – but you pull upwards! Weird.


Score: 6/10. Loses marks for the low cubicle count, but the recent coat of paint probably hid a multitude of sins.

Coventry City 2 Sheffield Wednesday 1
15 February 2006

Another match, another defeat. Hardly surprising, is it? But it was also a new ground – literally. The Ricoh Arena (mmm, catchy) opened early this season. Not at the beginning – it wasn't finished and they had to play their first couple of home matches away instead. It's now done, though, and as modern stadia go it's not bad. The concourse between turnstiles and seats is pretty huge (with 'condiment points', no less, for the essential brown sauce for pies), and served beer.

No beer for me, though, as (in the absence of nearby pubs) I'd already had my pre-driving quota in Pizza Hut with reverend2001 (attending his first Wednesday match for a few years – and he claims he's going to come to more this season – nya-ha-haaa, there is no escape from bad football). Our seats were on the front row, but at least the view wasn't quite as terrible as the one I'd had at Leeds.


reverend2001 had no sooner said that they won't score from a free kick as it was almost the end of the first half, not almost full time, when we were 1-0 down. A second stupid goal when we were too busy arguing with the ref about why he hadn't given us a free kick to bother defending, and that was that. We did manage to pull one back thanks to another fine Chris Brunt free kick, but the expected loss did indeed happen.

And the toilets? Well, quantity is an understatement. There's no excuse for a paucity of bogs in a brand new stadium, and sure enough, there were loads. Seventeen cubicles, in fact.


The cubicle walls were a rather tasteful pale pseudo-wood laminate, with grey highlights to set it off. Lots of loo-rolls, sanibins in all the cubicles (one even had two in – one has to wonder why), and pretty clean.


The walls of the room were partly breeze-block chic, and partly painted in two-tone blue. Yet despite being less than six months old, the laminate cubicles are already showing signs of failure. You know how in really old loos the walls shift slightly out of alignment and you can't operate the lock properly? Well, that's what had happened to the cubicle I was in. That's pretty poor build quality!

Score: 8/10. Good score because of the impressive stretch of loos (there was also a second set with a further eight cubicles), but if they're showing signs of age already, what will they be like in a year or two?

Glasgow Rangers Supporters 2 Stoke City Supporters 2 (aet)
Rangers won on penalties
29 January 2006

Just like London buses – no bog-blogs for ages, then two arrive at once.

I was running the line in a cup quarter final. They'd not normally have linos assistant referees in quarter finals, but there was a spot of aggro in the league fixture between the teams earlier in the season involving disputed offside calls. So I got to trundle up and down the touchline, flagging Stoke players offside for half the match (because they were incapable of staying onside), and not flagging much at all in the other half (because the Rangers players had got the hang of that complicated offside stuff much better).

And, being a cup match, a draw is not an acceptable result. It was bloody freezing and I wasn't best pleased when Rangers equalised with 20 seconds of normal time left. Bastards. I didn't care who won – just as long as someone did within 90 minutes! No such luck.

Fullers – yes, the brewery – clearly look after their sports ground much better than the councils do. The pitch was nice and flat, and had plenty of grass. You could even see the lines; sometimes they're more mythical than visible. While there wasn't a ladies' changing room as such, there was a ladies' loo, which was lovely and warm and there was plenty of space – and a chair to jam under the room's door handle in the absence of a lock. The loo itself was a thing of beauty – clean, loo-roll, what more can a girl ask for?


There were even nice clean showers with lovely new curtains – and copious quantities of hot water.


Score: 8.5/10. Pretty jolly good. If only all the parks pitches had facilities like this.

Blackburn Rovers Supporters 4, Aberdeen Supporters 2nd XI 1
8 January 2006

When I'm watching footy on wet, cold, miserable days, I sit smugly under cover looking at the poor players out on the pitch getting soggy, extremely glad that I'm nice and dry (if not exactly warm).

Unfortunately, when I'm the referee, I get wet.

It was definitely one of these days when the only adequate response was 'What the f**k am I doing here?'

As the third match on an already cut-up pitch on a rainy day, the conditions underfoot were never going to be good. In fact, they were filthy: very wet and sticky, with little evidence of grass in a 20 yard radius of the centre circle or in the vicinity of the goals. The centre circle was a myth, and locating the centre spot involved standing somewhere between the two extremely distant visible extremes of the largely absent half-way line, and taking a guess where the middle of the goals were.

And as a match, it was a classic example of the glorious genre that is Sunday league football. Any vestiges of skill vanished in the mud, with studs being insufficient to stop the players sliding all over the place. Blackburn started with 10 players as the 11th was still on the tube, along with their one and only substitute. Aberdeen started with 11, but were sub-less – which proved a distinct disadvantage when one of their number wandered off the pitch to vomit, before vanishing into the dressing room, not to be seen again.

I pity the washing machines of the poor souls who got to wash the kit.

I got to share the refs' changing room with two other (male) refs, but commandeered it for my sole use to get changed. There are even ladies' loos. All mod cons, eh?

However, they're far from exotic, and hide down a dark, dingy, dirty corridor.


It doesn't get any better at the end of the corridor. In the five years I've been frequenting the ground, the only change has been the lovely new double-glazed windows they put in 18 months ago. Everything else is the same. Including the non-functioning light. The cleaners evidently don't grace the place with their presence very often, and there's rarely any loo roll.


And the sink – ick. It's evidently been used for a spot of boot-cleaning. I wonder how many weeks that mud has been there?


Score: 2/10. And they only get that many points because I've yet to see the loos actually blocked, because the loos at Wandsworth Common are, amazingly, worse, and because the parky is nice and friendly and lets me thaw my fingers out after the match on the fan heater in his office!

Preston North End 0, Sheffield Wednesday 0
December 26, 2005

Another match, no more goals. Preston are pushing for promotion so a draw was a reasonable result, but we're still in the relegation zone and that was the sixth match in a row in which we've not scored. And not looked like scoring. This isn’t entirely surprising, as all our strikers worthy of the name are injured. We desperately need Paul Sturrock to find us at least one who can actually put the ball in the net when the transfer window reopens in January. And hope he doesn’t get injured.

The last time I went to Preston was in our first season after we were relegated from the premiership, five years ago. The away fans were then housed in a terrace down one of the sides – one of four grounds we still got to stand at in league matches that season (the others being Gillingham, Fulham and Stockport). It started snowing about 10 minutes before the end, and by the time the final whistle blew on our inevitable defeat, it was snowballing down. A 25 minute route-march to the station through a blizzard wasn’t much fun.

Fortunately, the terrace has been condemned (though not yet replaced) and we were in a new stand behind one of the goals, which was shared with home fans. We’d sold out and I think there were about 3,500 Wednesday fans there, so the concourse under the stand was heaving – though amazingly we did manage to get beer and pies.

The toilets weren’t bad. There were two cubicles facing you as you went in…


…plus another seven down the side, so there were no queues either before the game or at the end of half time – though there was a bit of a wait after the match.


The cubicles were fairly roomy and reasonably clean, with abundant quantities of loo roll.


The ambience was normal football ground breeze-block chic, with a little bit of a twist – half the walls were pink breeze blocks, with pink mortar holding them together. I wonder if they had blue ones in the gents’?


Rating: 7/10. Not bad.