Although not, repeat not, if any part of this involves playing football in front of 6,000 excitable children, the combined effect of which was to create an atmosphere in Rijeka the adult human ear is simply not designed to process. This was a dreamlike occasion on many levels, from its quietly farcical staging, to a relentlessly high-grade England performance and a deserved 7-0 win, all of it glossed in the moment by the striking beauty of the setting. Rijeka is a gently crumbling Italianate coastal town, the stadium lodged up in the hills facing into the blue of the Adriatic.
From the stands here you could switch between watching Jude Bellingham cruise about the pitch like a human superyacht to following the cargo ships crawling across the curve of the bay, the grey-green fade of the hills below, white towers by the shore, like a pocket-sized Balkan Rio de Janeiro. Against this background, two key things happened. The first was an administrative abomination.
At 6pm Croatia and England kicked off this closed-doors, stadium-banned Nations League game in front of a packed and boisterous home crowd with barely a spare seat in the house. The ban was imposed as punishment for a mass fan march to the Stade de France in Paris last March, accompanied by Nazi salutes and the discovery, later, of a stash of combat-ready weapons, including “iron rods, telescopic batons and sharp wooden sticks”. In response to this, the Croatian Football Association said no to racism here by saying: yes, come along to the game you’re not allowed to come to because of racism.
A very simple suggestion to Uefa. If you’re in any way serious about making this point, just close the loophole that allowed the stands here to be filled with 6,000 children plus their designated “handlers”. It is at the very least a confusing message.
It seems to say: racism and children, this is a good combination. And given this seems to happen quite regularly, that racism is now a kind of children’s holiday event around here, football Christmas. And here’s your bonus bag of free tickets, brought to you by today’s matchday sponsor, racism.
Playing the game in Rijeka also punished England’s fans, with just a hundred allowed to make the two-hour drive down a two-lane highway from Zagreb. Although this was still a lovely place to be, with its jaunty open stands, the haze of sea, land and sky merging in the middle distance, and not forgetting the Brutalist away end, a fully enclosed steel prison cage, albeit so scenically placed you could probably Airbnb it in the off-season. On the pitch things were clearer, as England produced a sustained and genuinely high-grade performance from first to last.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
