At 4-30ish, we throw our bags onto a coach to leave the hotel for the game and within half-an-hour, we are pulling up on what looks like the Kelvin Way, the stadium in the distance. This is Faelledparken and is the site of the birth of the KB football club, mentioned earlier.
Faelledparken
It is adjacent to the Telia Parken, the stadium built to replace the Idraetsparken in 1992, as the home of the new club, FC Copenhagen. A couple of minutes later, we are marching past the stadium in search of food. The coach had dropped us right here in 2006, so I’m feeling comfortable of my bearings, although this will require walking away from the ground towards the built-up area where we pitched camp almost fourteen years ago.
Whilst there are restaurants aplenty, the message is the same at each one. Fully booked. No tables. It’s getting to the stage where we give up when we stumble upon a small Vietnamese restaurant up a side street. The hostess greets us with a smile and it’s game on.
We are then served a banquet with about seventeen courses, each one delicious. In fact, we would probably still be there had a certain matter of the match not be taking place. We eventually settle the bill, make our excuses and leave.
They’re here and they’re always here!
It’s a good fifteen-minute jog to the Telia Parken and we have…about fifteen minutes to get there. We reach our destination as the teams are kicking off and enter the bedlam of the away end, forcing our way through the seas of Celtic fans behind the goal towards the far corner, via a quick hello with Tony from Cluj/Rennes.
Finally, we can draw breath. We’ve hardly settled into our new surroundings when a great move across the Danish box ends with French Eddie’s delightful clip finish for 1-0.
It’s Carlsberg shampoos all round, as the first objective of an away European trip is achieved, a meaningful goal. It transpires that this is the first away goal Celtic have scored in the knockout stages of a European competition since Henrik Larsson’s sliced finish knocked out Boavista in Oporto in April 2003, a game I mentioned earlier and a quite staggering statistic.
It was a finish worthy of the King of Kings. The first half continues where we left off in Rome, with the yellow-shirted Celts swarming into attack after attack. The only surprise at the interval is that we have not added to our lead. This has been a theme of away ties in Europe this season, playing like Celtic, even away from home against good opposition.
It is a million miles from the displays I watched on the continent for much of the eighties and nineties, and into the new millennium. And it is a very welcome change from all of that, with improved results.
