Serbian fans could not look more different to Austrian ones.Especially when their team leads 3-0 at half time. The noise of 10,000 Serbians can raise the dead.Throughout the game, dozens of these flares were lit up, covering the pitch in wafts of thick smoke. After attending matches in the UK, where simply standing up warrants a telling off from a steward, this was really a sight to behold. When Milos Krasic opened the scoring with a fantastic long range strike, the hair on the back of my neck was singed ever so slightly by a bright red signal flare held up behind by a group of Red Star fans. Serbian fans love signal flares, and anything that goes boom.Austrian police will be too scared to intervene. Never get too close to a gang of masked hooligans in the Serbian end beating up a harmless overweight fan with metal poles.This was further emphasized by the fact that the three guys in front of me all had pictures of Arkan (Serbian paramilitary leader, folk hero of the Yugoslav wars and leader of Red Star Belgrade’s militant ultras group, the Delje) as their smart phone backgrounds. Once in the stadium, Serbian men, women and children sang at the top of their lungs for 90 minutes about how Kosovo represents the heart of Serbia, explained in great detail by a 14 year old joint-smoking ruffian beside me. Serbians are very, very nationalistic.Turns out he would’ve sold it for 20 and would use the extra 10 on alcohol and cigarettes. He smiled from ear to ear, muttered something to Alex, took my money, and disappeared into the crowd. Expecting to pay €50 or more for a ticket, I offered a tout 30.
When aiming to purchase a football ticket, or any commodity from someone who you believe you can haggle with, NEVER name a starting price.Luckily, Alex turned up soon and we scoured the 50,000 or so people mulling around outside the stadium for ticket touts.įrom this evening, I learned the following: Securing a ticket was going to be a challenge. The Austrian national team had suffered a slow fall from grace from the glory days of Toni Polster and Andreas Herzog, with a tame showing at the recently concluded Euro 2008 indicating that pessimism was the order of the day amongst the home fans.Īt the behest of my Serbian friend Alex, I decided to show up to the cavernous Ernst Happel Stadion ticket-less, without any knowledge of Serbo-Croat vocabulary past ‘hello’, ‘ how are you doing’, ‘really?’, I love you’, etc. At the time I was living in Vienna, and Austria were to take on a Serbian side including Branislav Ivanovic, Milos Krasic and Dejan Stankovic in a FIFA 2010 World Cup Qualifier. I wrote this back in 2008, and it remains one of my most intriguing match day experiences.