I pluck my ticket box from a drawer and begin the search. Sifting through card and paper, Meadow Lane then Burnden Park resurface, then Old Trafford and Maine Road, each glanced name throwing me back to that match and that day, buses and trains and terraces. From between Wembley and Millmoor, the treasure I’m seeking escapes. It falls to the floor like a spent autumn leaf. I pick it up and retreat to August 1995.
Coloured in the green of a school paper towel, at just six centimetres long and five wide it is more dinner chit than ticket. Its inky tidings have not faded: “K.S.V. CERCLE BRUGGE” announces a header. Beneath, a box declares a price of 350 Belgian francs (just under £8) and permits access to the south Tribune, and Blok 14. That blue biro “14” is scrawled in angular lightning fork numerals like those I’d only before seen in GCSE French textbooks. Then come some rules and regulations in Flemish that no football fan reads regardless of the language deployed, and finally the logo of the Jupiler Ligue or Liga, an interpretation dependent on which side of the Belgian divide its reader identified with.
I flip the chit over and to my delight encounter a small map of the Olympia – now Jan Breydel – stadium, that artistic mainstay of the paper ticket. Its thin lines show Blok 14 to be behind a goal, which is just where I remember us being, me and my mum.
The circumstances in which we came to spend the Wednesday evening of a short break in Bruges watching Cercle and Gent strain to a goalless draw do not make me proud. It was neither the first nor last time that I’d forced a footballing diversion while we were on holiday. That year alone, on a visit to Colchester, Mum’s interest in Roman archaeology had meant a detour so that I could take photos of Layer Road. My interventions crossed into domestic life, too; at least once every six months now, she’ll recall the time I persuaded her to test out her new car by driving me to Chesterfield for a second round Worthington Cup tie (also a 0-0). On this occasion, I’d mentioned noticing in World Soccer magazine that Cercle were at home, whoever Cercle were. Soon, I looked on as she queued in the tourist information centre and asked of bemused staff more used to fielding enquiries about canal trips and beer samplings: “How do we get tickets for football?” I was 13 and pushing parental indulgence to the extreme.
We took a bus to the stadium and arrived in a vision of Bruges far departed from the precision beauty of the city centre. Here was grey, here was concrete, here was the gripping stench of strong cigarettes. Here were men with hot dog mustard in their walrus moustaches, here were stalls of green silky scarves, here were incomprehensible songs in alien rhythms.
Inside, the giant east and west grandstands engulfed those of us in Blok 14 of the south terrace as if we were a rowing boat between two cruise liners. It was all exhilaratingly different.
Tourists of the game fortunate to live in the Ryanair age flee to Germany, Spain and Italy and often neglect Belgium. Yet here is a football landscape of intrigue and difference, brimming with authenticity and blissfully – on the whole – unsullied by big money. It is a small land stuffed with grounds whose nooks, crannies and wizened characters make for a rich, homely broth. It reminds me of the football in a country we know well, only with the added joy of small beers clasped against chests. They even split their top division towards the season’s end, too, although that particularly complicated phenomenon is soon to be obliterated.
As these photographs show, Belgian football is frequently shabby and yet oddly gorgeous. At least, that is, to the type of people who keep old tickets in boxes. There is allure in these corrugated roofs and terraces overwhelmed by weeds with their toothpick crush barriers for resting on. To look at pictures and be able to smell the mud and feel the breathy cold is comforting, like watching a favourite old film. We see football being played for little more than love alone and watched in frozen devotion. We feel as if we could be in these images too.
A couple of years ago I went back to Cercle, this time with two friends. Phone research replaced tourist information enquiries, a taxi usurped the bus. The Jan Breydel is no longer lopsided, with hulking stands on all four sides. Concrete and mustard moustaches remain. This time from the north stand among the rat-a-tat drums and droning chants of young ultras, I looked across the pitch and once again felt the immense, thrilling privilege of watching football someplace else. Then, glancing beyond the other goal, I imagined me and my mum, and appreciated more than ever her unending encouragement of a boy’s obsession, in Bruges and beyond. The game, against Standard Liege, ended in another draw.
On the second evening of that recent trip, I fell in love. I imagine you’ve heard of Union Saint-Gilloise of Brussels, whether through their Champions League escapades or their association with Tony Bloom, before his Gorgie arrival. Perhaps you knew of the storied old club, or even its recent doldrum days. What you may not know, however, is that they play football in a terraced Eden.
The Joseph Marien Stadium is a wonder. An art deco main stand soothes the eyes and its three sides of terrace fill them. There is a forest backdrop, from which trees peep over and crane their necks to try and watch the match. It sprinkles the feeling of being removed from the city and extracted from the everyday, left alone in the sanctity of football, exactly how it should be. Then the singing starts and you have never been to a concert like it.
Market forces and finickety rules always infiltrate European football, regardless of the nation. Naturally, then, Union are seeking to abscond the Joseph Marien for somewhere shinier. It is another reason to put yourself inside one of these photographs. Try and get a paper ticket, if you can.