Posh Blog

I've been in France this weekend, mainly to get experience of driving abroad which turns out to be surprisingly easy. If you can drive you can drive anywhere. We took the Eurostar down on the Friday which is so much less hassle than getting the Ferry. We spent about 20 minutes in the terminal before our train was called for boarding, drive straight on the train, read a book for 20 minutes and then you're on the other side, where you drive straight off and into a shopping centre. Easy.

On the Saturday we spent the day in Lille which is a pretty nice place, the only problem with French cities is that places aren't usually signposted in advance so usually when you see where you're meant to be going you've already gone past it, which means we spent around twice as much time driving around as we wanted.



For lunch we decided to do what everyone would do in Lille, visit a Brothel. L'Omnia is a brothel turned porno theatre turned restaurant. Unfortunately the only videos on show these days is a French music channel so that would explain the amount of children inside. Even more disappointing were the staff, they weren't pornstars. Or if they were, they were bad ones.

In the evening we were at the Stade Lille Metropole to get a taste of French Football. Lille vs Toulouse was the match and it clearly inspired Toulouse fans to make the 555 mile trip instead of watching the rugby, a massive 20 away fans turned up, seated in what was basically a zoo cage.




The stadium itself is basically an athletics stadium, LOSC are only there temporarily while their new stadium is constructed. I can't really speak for the Premiership as I've only been to one Premiership game but it seemed to me like the security is much stricter in France. Every single person who entered the stadium is frisked and my ticket was checked 3 times before I could get to my seat.

The standard of the game itself really wasn't too far different from watching a game between two top League One teams, neither side showed anything special. Ligue One has an almost SPL like domination at the top, Lyon have won 7 years running and are top again this year by 5 points. The first half was a little dull, the only excitment coming from some dodgy decision making by the referee and the booing of every touch from Toulouse striker Andre-Pierre Gignac. Obviously some history there.



The second half finally brought some excitement, it got pretty heated as players from both sides seemed to dive and then make the most of it on the floor, both sides picked up bookings, Florent Belmont for Lille getting his for abusing the linesman who made some very poor decisions. Despite being the poorer team throughout the game Toulouse scored first from a freekick that shouldn't even have been given. Lille finally started sending everyone forward after that and got the goal from a long distance driven freekick in the last minute of normal time.

I guess you get what you pay for though as the ticket price for an adult was about the same as it would be to sit in London Road for a Posh match and the quality of football was about the same.

Next Match Attending

Tranmere v Posh
9/12/08 7.45pm
Prenton Park