Euro 2012 Diary: Pretty Donetsk, ugly Portugal

Jonathan Wilson
27 June 2012

Joao Vieira Pinto sees red against South Korea in 2002 as Portugal crashed out at the group stages.

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Jonathan Wilson escapes from the hussle and bussle of matchday madness to appreciate the sights in Donetsk. As for tonight's match, we may see the ugly side of Portugal's football if things don't go their way.

"Portugal have a habit of combusting when they go out of tournaments or it’s easy to imagine one of their midfielders picking up two yellows
in an attempt to win the ball back from Spain’s tiki-taka."

It was hot in Donetsk yesterday; extremely hot. Given how sweaty I was when I arrived at the stadium, it was probably a mistake to walk the 40 minutes from the apartment behind the old hospital at the bottom of Pushkin Boulevard, but exercise is always in short supply at tournaments and it is a lovely walk. Donetsk doesn't have the best of reputations but, given it's essentially an industrial city, it's extremely pretty in places.

It's probably not somewhere you'd come on your holidays but there's a sense of life and vibrancy about it and, as somewhere to stay and work for a few days, it's hard to fault it. There's even something welcome about seeing the statues of Lenin, Pushkin and Serhiy Bubka and knowing you've pretty much exhausted the tourist highlights.

Pushkin Boulevard itself runs for a little over a mile through the centre of town, a 50-yard wide strip of trees and flowers and grass with fountains and statues dotted all around. It doesn't feel like the city at all, which is extraordinary when you consider that Artema, the main street of Donetsk, runs parallel only a block away.

There is a Shakhtar fans shop a little way up, there are various restaurants and bars - I ate in a superb Georgian restaurant on Monday evening; Steve McManaman was at the next restaurant up the bank - and during the day stalls sell carved wooden items and folk jewellery. Yesterday there was a group of babushkas in traditional dress singing.

The opera house backs onto Pushkin. I saw a performance of the Magic Flute there four years ago but as I walked past yesterday there was a blast of Nessun Dorma, a song that still causes the hairs to prickle on the back of my neck. I suspect for most English people of my generation there'll never be a World Cup that good. It wasn't just England's progress - although that helped of course - it was the whole package: that might have been an awful tournament in terms of the football, but it was packed with great stories - Cameroon reaching the quarter-final, an exceptional West Germany team, Yugoslavia's last stand, Argentina's absurd doggedness. And perhaps football is always better when you're in your mid-teens.

Certainly England's defeat to Italy on Sunday lacked the drama of the 1990 defeat. I watched it in a bar with Sid Lowe of the Guardian, Mark Ogden of the Telegraph and Oleksandr Sereda, in whose grandmother's flat I'm staying. I can't say I've ever been particularly passionate about England but when you're in a bar with two other English blokes and there's a general swell of support for Italy among the other patrons, it does tend to bring out whatever patriotism is there.

But really it became laughable. It almost seemed as though Roy Hodgson were deliberately playing in a retro style to match his retro accent. We ironically lapped up every long ball at Andy Carroll. "That's football! They can't handle him!" while at the same time cringing that we'd been reduced to that. And of course come the penalties there was the familiar sense of inevitability. As Hodgson said, the more you lose the more it becomes a psychological issue but the odd thing is that the only English side to lose a penalty shoot-out in a Champions League final did so to another English club. In 100 years the figures will probably have evened themselves out - after all, England have only lost six shoot-outs (and won just one) - but there may be further pain to come first.

RECOMMENDED BET: I've already suggested backing 1-0 and 2-0 to Spain, but I'm very tempted by the 4.1 available on there being a red card. Portugal have a habit of combusting when they go out of tournaments or it's easy to imagine one of their midfielders picking up two yellows in an attempt to win the ball back from Spain's tiki-taka.