Ground: De Goffert

Visits: 1

Date: 17th June 2007

Match: England U21 - Serbia U21 2-0 (UEFA U21 Championships)

Attendance: 9 133

 

My fourth and last game in the tournament was England against Serbia in Nijmegen. By now all the travelling were beginning to take its toll and I was actually a bit happy this was my last day in Holland. Once again I met up with Neil in a town centre and when we found a nice restaurant there were plenty of other fans around. Some of them even danced for us (see picture below)..... De Goffert is a stadium with a capacity of 12 000 and situated a bit off the city centre of Nijmegen, and once again it was useful to be driven to the match. England needed a win to go through and when the game started it was soon obvious which team had the biggest motivation. The most memorable moment of the match was not be a nice one, the Serbians fans made monkey chants towards some English players in the first half and the game was abandoned for a couple of minutes. An anti-racial message was read out and the game continued. If there had been another racist chant in the game I think England would have walked off the pitch. In the end the English players and fans could leave the ground in a good mood though, England had won by 2-0 and were through to the semis. Neil drove me back to my hotel and we said goodbye to each other after some fun and interesting days in Holland. Some might say an U21 tournament is not worth spending money on but the general quality of the football was quite high and combined with the touristing I made this has to go down as a successful trip!

 

 

 

 

 

 

Kick-off

 

 

East Stand

 

South Stand

 

West Stand

 

 

Serbia fans

 

East Stand

 

Pano