It Was REALLY Worse Than Expected

Since moving from Koeln, I had known going back to, and leaving, on either side of the England-Sweden match was going to be difficult. The train reservations I had were made with built in cushions to make connecting trains to get me back to my hotel in Nuernburg, then to Gelsenkirchen, today, for Mexico-Portugal.

As it turns out, Die Bahn in Koeln was not prepared for the Norse-Saxon invasion.

The Koeln Hauptbahnhof was overflowing with people looking for trains to replace the ones they had missed. The floors of the halls and main lobby were filled with sleeping bodies, looking overall, very much like a football refugee camp. My 2 a.m. train left the station at 2:35 a.m., without me on it. Would have missed my connection in Frankfurt, which is the opposite way from Gelsenkirchen. Instead, waited until a little after 4 a.m., and cobbled a path via a couple trains to Gelsenkirchen, where I arrived at 6 a.m.

It's now about 10:30 and I watched the town come to life, waiting again, as I was, for the Media Shuttle to the Stadium.

Oh yeah, the England-Sweden game.
Joe Cole scored a brilliant shot from outside the left corner of the penalty area to give England a halftime lead. Sweden equalized early in the second half on what appeared to most of us on the field to be an own goal but the scorer awarded it to Marcus Allback, probably so someone, anyone, other than an Englishman would be in the history books as scoring the 2,000th World Cup goal.

England put Steven Gerrard on for a tiring Wayne Rooney in the 69th minute. It took him a little over 15 minutes to get into the flow of the match before Joe Cole chipped a soft ball to the back post that Gerrard hammered home off a header to give England a 2-1 lead.

It looked like that would stand until the oldest player on the field, Sweden's Henrik Larsson, a veteran of the '94 Sweden World Cup Semifinal squad, but now with a shaved head instead of the flowing dreadlocks of then, heel-flicked a ball to the back post, beating everyone for the equalizer in the final minute of regulation.

There will be some great photos to come from this match later. My laptop, the replacement for my wonderful G3 PowerBook, stolen in January, is woefully inadequate and giving me nightmares every time I download images into it. Have not had a chance to get the match properly edited.

As with all the content of this blog, written and photographic, Copyrighted 2006, All Rights Reserved, Perry McIntyre, Atlanta, GA - USA.