Diary / Jonathan Wilson / 09 June 2008 / 2 Comments

Jonathan Wilson is in Bern and wow is it surreal! Read his diary entry here.

The old town of Bern is slightly surreal even at the best of times. Packed into a narrow spit of land in a loop of the river, it looks from the hills that surround it like any other cluster of red-roofed Mitteleuropean houses, but get close and its strangeness becomes apparent.

The whole area was rebuilt after a fire in 1405, and has survived pretty much untouched ever since, long canyons of near identical streets that are disconcerting in their sameness. It is presumably to alleviate the sense of uniformity that so many individual touches have been added. There are odd, quirky fountains - 11of them - of which significantly the weirdest is the one on Kindlifresserbrunnen that depicts a giant eating children. There are flags and banners everywhere and, by the old western gate, stands a huge clock.

It is mounted on a tower - which, it is said, helped Einstein reach his theory of general relativity as he pulled out of town on a train. Looking back at the clock, he realise that if he were travelling at the speed of light, the time shown by its face would appear never to change; the time shown by his watch, though, would keep ticking on; time was, thus, relative.

He would only have been able to see the time on the clockface, though, because it is so huge, dwarfing the tower onto which it is set. Crowds gather to watch it chime, a process that takes around four minutes as interlocking hoops spin and various figures - bears, milkmaids, town burghers - revolve. Look too intently, and you begin to feel slightly nauseous. It's all rather like being trapped on the set of the Avengers.

What made it even odder yesterday was the presence of thousands of Dutch fans in town for this evening's game against Italy. To the colour blind they probably don't look anything special, for their genius is to wear quite normal clothes - fur coats, boiler suits, ecclesiastical robes - it's just that they're all bright orange. There were impromptu kickabouts, singalongs and, brilliantly, one fan who hid by a bus-stop with a megaphone and made nonsensical announcements in a bus-driver's monotone as passengers alighted: "All change. All change, please: this bus is now a fish." "Change here for tram number 12, the town hall and the hanging gardens of cheese." "Emergency, emergency. This is not a drill. This city is under attack from giant sheep."

Beneath the jollity, though, was the fear that this Dutch side will not only fail to qualify (they are [1.96] to go through) but, having taken just one point from two games against Romania in qualifying, could even finish bottom of the group. In both those matches, Romania simply sat two banks of four in front of the Dutch and watched them pass the ball around in front of them. An array of classy attacking midfielders, it seems, is not enough to turn possession into goals.

By contrast, world champions Italy ([2.5] to win this evening) have in their ranks the player Ottmar Hitzfeld believes will finish as top scorer in the championship - Luca Toni [16.5]. The German knows the giant target man well, having coached him at Bayern Munich last season, and warns against writing him off because of his ungainliness. "When you see him in training you wonder whether you can play top league football - he misses a lot of chances," he said. "When the game comes, he is mentally strong. He's ice cold in front of goal, always sniffing out chances."

Italy may not significantly have changed personnel since the World Cup, but they have changed style, and with Mauro Camoranesi and Antonio De Natale wide, the whole system is geared to providing ammunition for Toni. Given that the Dutch centre-back pairing of Joris Mathijsen and Johnny Heitinga have long been highlighted as the true weakness of this Holland side - at least in part, it must be said, because of the attacking nature of the full-backs and the flaws at the back of the midfield - this might not be the best game for their families to watch.

Bern already has one depiction of a giant snacking on smaller figures; this evening it could have another.

Tags: Betfair, Euro 2008 Betting, Euro 2008 Diary, Holland, Italy, John Wilson