BIRTHDAY PARTY
DANIEL COOPER GIVES US THE LOWDOWN ON HIS UNFORGETTABLE EUROPEAN ADVENTURE...
A special adventure
NOT many people would want to celebrate becoming 20 over the space of two-and-ahalf weeks but not everyone loves football as much as me. My thought process began around my 19th birthday when I said to my Dad: “I want to save up and go to watch the biggest teams in Europe.”
I’m sure I’m not the only one who’s said something and thought it’ll never happen. However, in June I had a ‘why not?’ moment, booked three weeks off work and thought ‘let’s make this happen’.
After the football fixtures came out it was my job to work out a route around Europe (clockwise or anti-clockwise).
I booked the football tickets and told dad to book the stopovers. We set off down to Southampton on my 20th birthday to watch Southampton vs Brighton before catching a ferry overnight.
We then drove to Brugge for Brugge vs Dortmund and stayed overnight. We had thought we could go to Ajax the next day, but tickets were extortionate, so we drove down to Marseille a day early as I believed we had tickets to watch them in the Europa League. I found out that morning we didn’t as the game was being played behind closed doors!
On the Friday, we drove to Madrid and went to see Atlético’s new stadium. Having taken us a rather strange way to get there, I decided I wanted to see in.
I couldn’t find anywhere to see inside the ground but there was a hole above a turnstile which was eight foot tall. The only way I could see in was to get on my 53-year-old dad’s shoulders, which, somehow, gave me a great view!
The next day we travelled round Madrid and saw all the main tourist attractions before walking up to Real Madrid’s Santiago Bernabéu home just the three hours early.
Arriving in the stadium, I was awestruck by the size of the ground - it is easily the best sight I had on the tour.
We saw VAR for the first time live and, although it has its controversies, we knew it gave the right decisions.
After seeing the Bernabéu, we thought we’d go to a less impressive ground the next day so drove across Spain to Barcelona to see the Camp Nou! It’s just as impressive but what makes it different is that you know it’s going to be big based on the outside whereas the Bernabéu hits you when you go in.
We moved on to Milan via the south of France, where I got to drive around Monaco and along the Formula One race track. In Milan, we got to visit another iconic stadium in the San Siro. Although I’d rather have seen AC Milan for their history, we saw Inter, who are the better team these days.
We also got to see the Milan cathedral before moving on to Turin to see Juventus and Cristiano Ronaldo.
At the age of 20, I was able to say I’d been to the Bernabéu, Camp Nou, the San Siro, driven along the Monte Carlo race course and seen the modern day best two players in the world - and all done in the space of five days!
We then drove through Germany and got to watch a Bundesliga 2 game at Greuther Fürth. However, it wasn’t the most entertaining game.
The two Bundesliga games we saw definitely made up for it, though. Having watched Hertha Berlin shock Bayern Munich at the Olympiastadion with a sensational 2-0 victory, we followed it up with an unbelievable game in Leverkusen where Borussia Dortmund came from 2-0 down with a breathtaking second half fightback to win 4-2!
We then ventured into Holland which was a sixth new country for us and saw Feyenoord win late with an unbelievable Robin van Persie free-kick before the Dutchman was later sent off.
We came back to England to see Reading after a tour around London. I then had the chance to go and watch Sheffield Wednesday, which happens to be the first club I saw in my life. Overall, the trip was a great success, I honestly couldn’t think of a better way to spend my birthday. I don’t think anything holiday-wise or as a birthday will ever top my 20th!