Supporter takes journey advice to extremes... via Mallorca

THE rise of Rangers from the fourth division of Scottish football can hardly be understated, and one of the mantras of that slog back up through the tiers was the idea of “making friends on the journey”.

That journey has taken the club from Stirling Albion to Seville, and one dedicated supporter put the making-friends motto firmly into action as he trekked across Europe for the clash with Eintracht Frankfurt.

Ravi Sood, from Jordanhill in Glasgow’s west end, started out with a simple plan he had hatched with friend Pushkal Gandhi. Things did not quite go the way they had intended.

Finally standing in Seville’s Alameda de Hercules ahead of the game, he told our sister paper, the Glasgow Times: “We’d planned it out a few weeks ago. We took a risk and thought,

‘if we don’t make it, let’s go for a holiday’.

The pair drove from Glasgow to Birmingham during the early hours of Tuesday to catch a flight to Mallorca.

Ravi said: “The drive’s fine, first flight is not a problem. We get to Mallorca and our flight is delayed. So we miss the flight to Seville. Ryanair do nothing about it.”

It was then they struck up an unlikely friendship that would take three travellers on a road trip worthy of a Hollywood film.

Ravi explained: “We ended up with someone who was in the same predicament, [but] she had no idea that football was even happening and was going for another reason.

“So we picked her up and just basically decided together, ‘what we need to do is get to mainland Spain somehow’. What we did was book a flight from Mallorca to Valencia. We booked that, then decided to hire a car, and we drove about seven or eight hours across Spain, east to west, from Valencia to Seville.

“We did that, dropped her off, dropped the car off, got a taxi back to our own hotel, checked in about 4am and now here we are.”

Asked about that overnight trek, Ravi sheepishly admitted it wasn’t he who bore the strain.

He said: “I don’t drive, so my pal did the driving from Glasgow to Birmingham and then did the drive from Valencia to Seville. He seems all right.”