Diary / Jonathan Wilson / 26 June 2008 / Leave a comment

Jonathan Wilson's cosmopolitan diary update from Vienna. Read his views on giant hailstones, Valencian drumming legends and moronic football fans of all nations.

What a damp squib that turned out to be. For half an hour I sat in a bar in Vienna watching a group of Germans reacting as their mates who were at the game in Basel texted them with news from the semi-final.

Frustration turned to glee turned to agony turned ecstasy, all played out on the face of a fan who looked disturbingly like a chubby Thomas Hitzlsperger. The television signal, as I understand it did all over Europe, went down, but we didn't get it back until well after the final whistle.

Was this some great conspiracy, we wondered? How odd that Germany, who were very definitely on the back foot when the picture died, should have come back to win in dramatic circumstances under the cover of darkness. As Austrian television meandered through a post-match discussion, taking almost half an hour before they showed those last three goals, speculation mounted that actors were hastily constructing them on a sound stage in the Arizona desert. And what, you wondered, was going on in Glasgow? Were they throwing bottles at their own televisions?

In Vienna there was none of the violence that erupted among Rangers fans in Manchester at the Uefa Cup final when the big screens failed.

Then, again, very few people in Vienna (the zombies in the Karlsplatz Tunnel of Doom excepted) had been hitting the Special Brew for 12 hours beforehand. In the bar there was resignation and laughter - not least among those of us who were supposed to be discussing the game on a podcast afterwards - but even among those in the fanzones the mood was benign.

It probably helped that the cause of the failure was so obvious - an astonishing thunderstorm that rent the skies for the best part of an hour. I was inside, fortunately, but I'd been caught in a similar, only slightly less severe storm the day before, when an umbrella provided about as much defence as a leather jacket against an AK47. Huge hailstones hammered from the sky, great rivers cascaded down the gutters, and the entire population, it seemed, huddled in U-Bahn stations.

In the end last night, with water rising to knee height and above, the fanzone had to be evacuated. In the Bierklinik, we got a call from the Irish radio journalist Ken Early, who'd been midway through presenting a live show when he'd been forced to leave his studio near the fanzone because of the potential for flooding. As he spoke to us, he was trapped under a bus-shelter, watching the waters rise. He did get out in the end, I'm glad to say.

What is slightly odd is the absence in Vienna of any real sign of fans for tonight's semi-final. I did see Manolo el del Bomo, the famous Valencia drummer, yesterday parading around St Stephen's Cathedral with a small entourage, but he almost counts as a celebrity these days. When he turns up it feels more like a state visit than anything else.

"This role has brought me more than my fair share of problems: my wife divorced me and I've had money worries, but it's the only life for me," he said. "I do what I want, when I want, which is a great luxury. People have shown me great affection for so many years. No, I really wouldn't change for all the tea in China."

In the hour or so before the game, there were odd groups of Turkish and German fans, but during the day the noisiest fans I'd seen were a group of Italians on the U-Bahn. On which note, while I get and don't object to fans congregating at a central square or large bar and singing to themselves and those around, why do so many fans seem to feel that as soon as they pull on a football shirt, the normal rules of behaviour don't apply? Really, there isn't anything big or clever about clapping and shouting to intimidate old ladies. I blame Uefa.

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