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A sunny Friday afternoon in Tbilisi left those remaining Scotland fans spoilt for choice as to what to do with their last few hours on Georgian soil. A cleansing dip in the sulphur baths of the old town? A stumble down the pot-holes of Rustavelli? Or perhaps just sip gorgeous Georgian wine in a bar where the wine is as tasty as the service is slow. The answer was none as Chris Houston, Simon Kellas and myself went back to the stadium of nightmares for the top Georgian league match of the weekend ( first versus third) Dinamo Tbilisi v FC Wit. As a Chelsea fan, it was a bit of a shock paying an entrance fee of 60p. Even more of a shock was Chris having the brass neck to say with genuine sincerity "It’s alright guys, I'll get this" as if he was just picking up the tab from an all night session in a Moscow lap dancing bar. The novel idea of a combined ticket/programme for the game might not really take off in the UK. To try and get your head round this imagine them ripping the bottom right hand corner of your matchday programme when you walk in through the gates. It could have been a good money spinner but I don't think the “buy 2 copies and put one in a plastic envelope” brigade are strong on the streets of Tbilisi, even at 60p a throw. Before I travelled, I was told Georgia was a land of poets but the last place I expected to meet one flogging his wares was in the stand of the Dinamo stadium. In true working class poet style he was selling a small paper tome from a battered carrier bag. At first, I thought it was a football fanzine but an English-speaking Georgian told me it was poetry. When I offered a 20 lari note for 3 copies the guy almost spontaneously combusted with joy till he realized he couldn't change it and I was buying nothing. Having nearly multiplied his previous year's sales by a factor of three he was a broken man. He was also flogging photocopied caricatures of Ronaldinho and David Beckham which looked like they had been drawn, badly, by a 5 year old. One thing I can never get my head around in Eastern Europe is the concentration of specific shops in one area. You don't see one sports shop for 3 days then you come across 10 of them on one street, funnily enough, next to the main sporting arena. Crossing the street from the sports shop drag required a combination of timing and good luck It was on this road that we witnessed the worst piece of driving seen in Tbilisi. A guy was driving down the road with a 2 year old sitting on his knee, behind the wheel, answering his mobile and trying to take the kid’s coat off all at the same time. It’s a wonder you don’t see more dead humans lying on the streets along with the inner city roadkill. Next to the stadium, Shoto Averladze's bar was very interesting, especially the framed weightlifter's outfit which took a bit of effort to work out exactly what it was. A fascinating collection of memorabilia was on display covering a wide variety of sporting heroes of the Soviet Union and then Georgia. There was also the somewhat odd sight of visiting celebrities having signed the wall. Even more bizarrely, one presumed they had stood on chairs to do so unless of course they were basketball stars. One word of advice to Shoto, put up a bit of a sign outside as it looks like an office block. On a stroll round the ground we came across the FC Wit team bus, looking like something that was state of the art for the Young Communist Games of 1959 but did not really cut it as a mode of transport in the 21st century. The tyres were flat, the exterior and interior both filthy and the majority of seats broken. Amazingly the windscreen was not cracked but that is the best you could say about it. In fact, you couldn't tell if the back seat was a treatment table or just a bench! There was an appalling lack of Dinamo Tbilisi memorabilia - not even a pin badge! However, there were Georgian FA wall clocks, a niche market the SFA might want to look into but I think LA will pass on. The only item relating to the club in the stadium’s sports shop were some overpriced Dinamo scarves. As ever, it was depressing to see Brazil strips dominate the racks when you could not even buy a local club top in any of the shops. Dinamo must now be seen as the Georgian Queens Park. This is a team that once attracted 110,000 people to see them beat Liverpool 3-1 in the European Cup and here they were playing in front of 250 max on a Friday afternoon. The reasoning behind this bizarre KO time was that the national boss, Toppmoller, asks the Georgian FA to spread the league games when he is in town so he can see as many players as possible. With crowds this size the economics of keeping the club alive must be down to the indulgence of a patron or the mafia, maybe even both. God knows what ex-QPR and former captain of Australia, Ned Zelic, made of it all as he slogged it out in defence for Dinamo. The best skills on display came courtesy of another pair of imports - the Gabonese duo of Didier Janvier "Ovono" Ebang and Georges Edouard "Akiremy" Owondo, who must be thanking their agent for getting them such a high profile gig. An interesting trip back to a quality stadium was rounded off by a brief stroll through the extremely dilapidated area around the Tbilisi railway station. I wouldn't say it was bad but the best thing you could say about it was it reminded you of Elephant and Castle on a bad day. In certain places the market replicated a refugee camp with stall covers created out of random pieces of plastic sheeting and people staring glumly from beneath them. Maybe they were Dinamo fans who were unable to afford the 60p entrance and were unhappy that their 8 game winning streak had come to an end - or maybe they were just facing up to another day of hardship in Tbilisi. As ever with Georgia, there are more questions than answers. Words: Kevin Donnelly |
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