Get me out of here quick

And it was difficult to disagree with him. Me? I’ve tipped the USA to win the whole World Cup. That is because I like chaos and panic whereas Danny loves knowledge and permanence. Which is why he’s temporarily fuming.

Here is what happened. The train that is gliding us through the magnificent German countryside has, at the end of each carriage, our speed digitally displayed in kilometres per hour. Noticing that it seemed to have reached a new and constant high, I asked Dan how fast we were going in old-fashioned mph. This is just the sort of question DK loves to be asked. Pausing for barely three seconds, his eyes raised in momentary calculation, he said:

“We are now travelling at a hundred and thirty-three thousand miles an hour.”

“Wow!” I exploded, absolutely ready to believe him. “No, hang on,” he spluttered, “a hundred and thirty-three miles an hour, of course, a hundred and thirty-three miles an hour.” Too late, mate. Here was a rare chance for me to grab the statistical initiative. “Are you sure, Dan? Add it up again, I mean it does feel like we’re going at least a hundred thousand miles an hour, doesn’t it?”

Gleefully, I started to mention this leap into hyper-space at every opportunity. “Look at that man pushing the drinks cart down the aisle. What say you, Danny Kelly? Going at about two hundred thousand miles an hour, is he?” And so on until plainly my good friend felt the gag had worn a bit thin.

Actually, had our locomotive actually hit Danny’s marvellous mistaken miracle mileage, it still would not have been fast enough to get us away from Nuremberg. It’s safe to say that when we departed the old heart of Franconia — almost three days after the England parade had left town — the scales had fallen from our eyes. There is something truly woebegone about a town in the wake of a World Cup match. When the sun rises on the day after a fixture, the streets contain just the dregs, the dazed, the misplaced.

There are no crowded town squares, no side-street carnivals, no camera crews urging on the antics to ever more giddy and vulgar heights. In the overnight rain that followed England’s win against Trinidad & Tobago it was as if 30,000 football fans had suddenly become soluble, leaving behind the just-deflated flavour of what Hamelin must have felt like after the Pied Piper had led away the children.

Suddenly everything looks grubby and ordinary. Stragglers with pinched, exhausted faces, wilted flags of St George tied around their necks in knots that will have to be cut free with knives, stand beached outside Burger King. You mooch from street to street hoping the town might still retain pockets of the old excitement but just find that the locals have retaken possession and that spontaneity and samba have been replaced by grocery shopping and routine. This is not Disneyland after all.

Even sitting in the bars awaiting the blessed first kick-off of the day now has a dogged duty about it as opposed to yesterday’s pulsating vitality, a sensation heightened by the ease with which you can take your table.

What appeared just the day before as a vibrating magic den full of electricity and noise is now revealed to be a common concrete yard covered by a tarpaulin. The waitresses, recently so ready with song and mischief, eye you up as you enter as if to say: “What are you still doing here?” Outside, their new boyfriends, the first few arrivals of the next teams in town, get the big smiles and welcoming waves that were all yours just yesterday. Now you’re becoming invisible. Nobody speaks English any more and the menus are all in Japanese and Italian.

It’s time to take the train.

TELEVISION’S PLOT TO GLAMOURISE FOOTBALL FANS

I HAD SUSPECTED IT AT PREVIOUS World Cup tournaments but now I am sure; professional models are being used to fill up key seats at matches. At the Trinidad & Tobago game, seated right across the aisle to me was just about the most fabulous woman I have ever seen. Blonde, wonderfully made up and wearing a little dress so tight that it was me who could hardly breathe. She appeared unaccompanied and unconcerned throughout the match.

Now, I know what you’re saying: ‘The age of flat caps and rattles is dead, Baker. We live in an age where a third of most grounds are peopled by fabulously turned-out blondes in micro- materials, all of them more passionate and knowledgeable about the great game than you’. Well, possibly, but it was the behaviour of this divine dreamboat that confirmed my theory that Fifa must have a ticket hotline on permanent stand-by to Peter Stringfellow.

She sat for most of the game in a kind of distracted sulk. At intervals about ten minutes apart, she would suddenly stand up, whoop and dance. Then she would sit down again. None of these bursts of activity in any way corresponded to the action out on the pitch. Then the penny dropped. In those moments of startling fever she must have been getting her close-up shot on television. Quite how they were cueing her I don’t know, but I promise you one of her earrings did look suspiciously like a wire. Of course, the fact that TV directors regularly show us wonderful-looking women during internationals is well known to the point of cliché, but particularly in this tournament I have detected an element of perfection in the female fan as delivered by television that carries the whiff of central casting.

Now I knew for sure. The clincher came when England eventually scored. Not a flicker from our girl. When John Terry had earlier hoofed it off the line to deny T&T the lead? Same reaction. I can’t say I was complaining, but what the hell was she doing there? My mind drifted back to the Nuremberg streets just five hours previously. At every turn, on every corner, unshaven, crumpled, middle-aged Englishmen stood with pathetic hand-written signs hanging around their degraded necks: “Please. I Need A Ticket For The Game. Help me.” Others had their mobile phone numbers written on their foreheads or, more common, sliding in greasy ink droplets down their sweaty sunburnt backs. Every shop doorway boasted at least one mumbling British ruin pleading: “I’ve come all this way, I’ve come all this way.”

A rumour of even a single ticket available for high four-figure euros was the catalyst for swarming panic. Worst of all, at the gates of the stadium there were people on their knees, hands clasped as though in devout prayer, giving the most theatrical performance of utter destitution. “I can’t not be in there! Somebody, somebody do the right thing,” one wailed as we shuffled in, averting our eyes.

And yet, here in spiffy row H was Miss Universe filing her nails and stifling yawns between corners, though, to be fair, on the night, she was not alone in that. I have yet to see a single game that doesn’t feature at least a dozen similar fantastic creatures, separately hamming it up in their close-up. During the last Mexico match, a trio of them held hands, dancing wildly and still managing to look straight into camera! After 30 years in TV I can still barely find the lens from ten feet away. So are Fifa and the German TV authorities in cahoots cynically to pepper these games with ready-made images of advertiser-friendly, compliant professional football fans? One word here: Maradona.

MAD RATTERS

THE FOOD OUT HERE IS HIT AND MISS, and in most of the better establishments, if you don’t stick to traditional eating hours then you ain’t eating at all, chum. In Nuremberg we had one amazing lunch that revolved around a shoulder of pork the size of a sofa. Not feeling hungry again until about ten that night, we strolled along to the same street that had earlier been alive with culinary possibilities. Nothing doing. Just around the corner, though, was an unpromising bar in which we could watch the second half of Mexico v Angola. The laminated menu offered schnitzel, potato soup and salad. We chose the schnitzel.

Now here’s where you really have to trust me. There is enough on this trip to write about, so I do not need to invent the following. While we were waiting for our food, the biggest rat you have ever seen casually walked out from beneath the fruit machine and sat on one of the bar stools.

Danny Kelly attracted the staff’s attention and a woman shooed the thing back into the shadows, apologised to us and returned to her perch behind the counter. So did we stay and eat there? Well, the game had only 12 minutes left and who knows where else we would find open? Know what? It wasn’t bad.

E-MAIL: dannyanddanny@hotmail.com