That’s right, maybe I should have.
CAR
It all started like a nightmare. Thursday, I was quietly on a terrace in the Berlin-Mitte district and a nasty doubt assailed me. No dozens of flags in the windows, no jerseys in the street… Just a few black, red and yellow banners in a few windows. Not so many giant screens in bistros either. What was happening?
And then the astonishment doubled the doubt from the right. While I was preparing some papers with the regulation local beer as fuel, people ended up being interested in what I could do at night, with this screen in front of me, rather than feasting with lots of little neon green shots . “I’m a journalist and the Euro starts tomorrow,” I said as if it were obvious. And of course, it wasn’t…
Normal people who have normal lives.
Imago
Because Fred, my current interlocutor, asked me one of the most incongruous questions I had ever heard. “Ah yes, the European Football Championship. But where is it? And when does this thing start?”, said this 36-year-old German-Swede, physically stuck right between my excellent colleague Ugo Imsand-Curty and the no less excellent Thomas Wiesel.
“No, but I’m not stupid, I know it exists. But I don’t really care,” he explained to us in English, after we tried to speak in Swiss-German just for fun. Berlin has 4,469,439 inhabitants (approximately). So obviously I was going to find people far from the footballing sphere. But honestly, I didn’t think so much.
Yes, Germany is a ball country, which can fill dozens of fan zones (60,000 in the capital alone on Friday), a stadium in Munich for part of the Mannschaft and put 22.49 million viewers in front of the ZDF (69% market share) in the space of one evening… But you have to believe that there’s more to life than that.
How? Aren’t all people like that? Was someone lying to me?
To find out for sure, I decided to cross the city towards the Olympic Stadium on Saturday. A Hungarian-Swiss shouldn’t excite many people, but a football fan, especially during a Euro in his country, shouldn’t miss it. And then as I am regularly a little tense when my national team is on the field, I took my headphones, I put the RTS on my phone and I started the approximately 14 kilometers which separated me from Spain- Croatia and I screamed like all of you when Kwadwo Duah was declared in a legal position by the video referee.
Well you know what? I scared people. Yes yes. I had just passed the terrace of a kebab shop – there was a good chance, because there are 1,600 of them in the whole city – and as no one was paying attention to the TV which was broadcasting the match, I was passed for a big fool.
Same for the 2-0 scored by Michel Aebischer. The poor Chinese tourists who were waiting for the bus almost thought it was an attack from a fanatic of who knows what side. Well, in this case, they weren’t completely wrong.
What was my relief when I started to get closer to the stadium… Hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of checkered jerseys from Croatia, but also from all over Europe began to arrive in howling packs . Piles of red and gold Spain jerseys sang in one corner. Hordes of football fans were coming out of the U or the S-Bahn, most of them misty-eyed.
Phew, my world was back. I almost got scared.
