Salzburg

Ground: Stadion Salzburg Wals-Siezenheim

Visits: 1

Date: 10th June 2008

Match: Greece - Sweden 0-2 (EURO 2008)

Attendance: 31 063

Pictures: Scroll down!

When the draw for EURO 2008 was made it was clear I had some interesting matches and beautiful cities to look forward to. I travelled to Salzburg, for our opener against Greece, via Copenhagen and Munich. The journey didn´t start too well, the train was 35 minutes late but I eventually made it to Copenhagen and Munich. The last leg of the journey was by train to Salzburg (from Munich) and normally there are no border controls but major football tournaments nowdays seem to mean the Schengen agreement don´t apply. There were four (well-built) officers, with a laptop, looking for hooligans/terrorists and they actually found one, handcuffed him, and threw him off the train in Rosenheim.

I was in Salzburg by 4pm and after checking in at my hotel I had something to drink and eat (Wienerschnitzel!) before making the short journey to the ground. The ground has an official capacity of 31,500 and when the match started there were at least 10,000 Swedish fans, creating a suberb atmosphere, inside the ground. Greece played their usual defensive football but in the second half they were finally punished when Zlatan scored his screamer. The singing from the yellow end was now even better than before and after our second goal we knew victory was ours. A long day came to an end for me, but it is days like this that makes it all worth the time and money spent!

fans outside the ground