Everest, Afghanistan, the Outback – the weirdest places fans have followed a Port Vale game from
Earlier this month, OVF editor was listening to the away game at Leyton Orient while running (puffing) his way around a half-marathon course. It inspired him to ask the forum members where was the weirdest place they followed a live Port Vale game from. Here are the replies…
Thanks to viewers of the OVF forum for their responses.
From a monastery where I was on retreat…
I settled down in a bar in Nuremburg airport, in a corner, to “quietly” watch on the laptop, A couple of typical Bavarians, complete with lederhosen, asked what I was doing, so I explained. Anyway they were curious, asked who they should be supporting, I said “Vale, the ones in black and white.” So they settled down to watch. The crowd began to grow, so the bar owner asked what was going on. Seeing as it was quite quiet and pretty much everyone was gathered around my laptop, he said he’d put it on the big screen. So there was me and about 30 new Bavarian Vale fans sat in Nuremburg airport watching on the big screen. It was the Lincoln game, we lost 2-6…
I was in Quilpie, outback Queensland. I was working away there and managed to catch somewhere with decent Wifi! We got smashed 5-0 by Cambridge…
The weirdest would probably be following twitter to keep up to date with Vale v Rotherham in our first year back in L1 in between Xmas and New Year, we won 2-0. I was on a whale watching boat in the North Atlantic off Reykjavik/Hafnarfjordur in Iceland. Cold, we were bouncing off rough seas but got enough signal to keep track of the game!
I once used a phonecard to ring up Clubcall from a French payphone to follow a match against Swindon when I was a student. They must have thought it was just some UK landline number because I managed to ring it a few times over the course of the 90 minutes…
I used a payphone in the port of Istanbul about 30 years ago. Just to get the final score though…
I suppose the strangest place would be a bar in pat pong market, Bangkok. I was sitting up a corner, shooing away bar girls, avoiding the odd ping pong ball and declining various invitations and proposals of a “sensitive” nature. Before you jump to conclusions… the sign outside read “Girls Girls Girls” “Free Internet”…. and it was the latter that caught my eye…
13th December 1995 – Perugia 3-5 Port Vale Group A Game – Anglo Italian Cup. We went on coach to the match in Italy, however a severe snow storm stopped us in our tracks a few hours before kick off and we couldn’t get to the game, phoned home from a pay phone on an Italian service station to find out we were winning 4-2, game finished 5-3 to Vale!! Oh the days…
I flew to Santiago in Chile and met up with a cruise ship in Valparaiso for a trip up the west coast of South America and then on up to LA. The first port of call was a town called Coquimbo in Chile, the Vale were playing (It was the days of Valiant Player) and I insisted on listening to the Vale on the ship before going ashore which didn’t earn any brownie points at all…
Taipei Airport on August 25th last year . I was with my family, waiting for a flight to Singapore , and then on to Chiang Mai , Thailand .James Norwood put a big spanner in the works by scoring in the 77th min for Tranmere in a 1-0 win…
I was in a Tea house in Tengboche in the Kumbhu region of Nepal on my way to Everest base camp and watched a live stream of the MK Dons away game in April this year…
It must have been January 2006. I was in a phone box outside a hostel called “The Pint On Punt” in Melbourne when I was backpacking. I used a phone card to call my Dad in Kidsgrove. He put the phone by the speaker so I could listen the commentary at 2am. I was there for the full match, he briefly kept picking the phone up asking if I was still there. He thought I was absolutely mental. We lost 3-1 against Aston Villa in the cup…
Cavellosim, Goa. The local sports bar said they hadn’t got the game on, went back to our accommodation frustrated to say the least only to find the local Indian sports channel had the match on…
I once did two weeks training in Germany in a hotel which I am pretty sure was the set for ‘The Shining’. I was the only guest in this very large hotel. It had an abandoned swimming pool and was generally a scary place to be. The was even an odd room that was like a child’s room rather than a normal guest room. Anyway, the Wifi in the hotel was crap, and I mean crap. So the only place I could get enough signal to follow the game was in the bathroom next to the shower. Safe to say I dragged the pillow and quilt and listened to the game there…
I was in a hotel in Beijing when I heard we had been knocked out of the cup by Chasetown. I rang my wife from the hotel lobby at silly o’clock to get the score, and her opening statement was “You’re not going to like this…” Luke Rogers, two missed penalties – the dim sum didn’t taste the same after that…
I was in a hotel in Siem Reap, Cambodia when Vale were 1-0 down, I was absolutely knackered after a day temple trekking followed by an evening on the 30p beers. I fell asleep for about five minutes and managed to miss Vale’s equaliser. It finished 1-1, can’t remember who against but we were away…
I’ve listened in numerous deserts and portakabins around the world, but the weirdest one was a broken hardened bunker in Kandahar, Afghan we used as our base. I even met a couple of Stoke fans at Kandahar, so we had some good banter with them asking if we could use their tops as rags to clean our vehicles. It was funny trying to explain football to US Marines…
My aunt is a Greek Cypriot whose family used to live in Famagusta, who lost their home and possessions after being forced to flee to the south to avoid the invading Turks in 1974. Famagusta is right on the border and you can see the city from the Greek side, so in a visit there in 1990 my Aunt took us to the border from where you could see her old home. Now this day Vale were playing at Villa in the Cup and I was listening to the BBC World Service on a pocket radio desperately trying to find out the score. At this point, a Turkish border guard pointed a gun in my general direction indicating that perhaps I should move on. I took his advice. At that very minute the BBC informed me that Vale had lost 6-0! I don’t know which shocked me the most!
During the first Gulf War the club gave my mum free videos of games to mail to me. I got the video of the Portsmouth game (I think it was Portsmouth – it was a game we won 3 – 2) and managed to convince a Kuwaiti family to let me watch it in their house one or two days before the ceasefire. The other video I remember from that season was the one Brian Mills scored two goals in but that was just before coming home. Quite a few of the videos never got watched as I normally got three or four in a mail drop and there wasn’t room to keep them because the old VCRs were quite bulky, so I normally kept the wins and had to trash the rest…
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Ian Lancaster
18th October 2019 @ 2:38 pm
Iquitos in peru in the amazon
We beat Huddersfield