“What’s the purpose of your visit to Norway?”
“I’m here for a football match.”
“Which team?”
“It’s a small English team called Lewes.”
“Who are they playing?”
“FC Oslo.”
“FC Oslo? I’ve never heard of them and I’m a football referee.”
Not the best of starts at airport security. But having passed the immigration test by drumming up a story so ludicrous it has to be true, I’m in the country for Lewes’s second foreign excursion of the season.
So are about 40 other Rooks, all trying to convince an immigration officer that they too are here to watch a team from the seventh tier of the English pyramid take on a team from the fourth tier of Norwegian football, for the sheer hell of it. We’ve already qualified. They’re already out.
Still, let us not dwell on mere technicalities like a reason for being here. We’re settled in a smart Oslo bar, drinking our fifth schooner of something rather alarmingly called “Schweat” and knocking back expensively acquired pizza. Life is good. But there’s a football match we’ve got to get to that’s about five miles away, and suddenly people are scrambling to find their coats.
What’s the hurry? There’s a message from Chairman Emeritus Fuller. Kick-off has been brought forward, because they’re worried about the floodlights being switched off. This is international Non-League.
An advanced party led by Richard Irving heads for the door, smartphone in hand, trying to make Google Maps behave itself. A splinter group starts heading in another direction, but Richard exudes the confidence of a man who knows the location of Oslo Underground stations like the back of his hand, and the renegade group is called back.
Suddenly, Richard’s confidence evaporates like the sixth schooner of Schweat and 40-something 40-somethings are stood in the middle of Oslo, squabbling over whether we should head east or west.
Richard is demoted from Chief Navigator, order is restored and we’re soon on the tube to FC Oslo. It’s a 15-minute walk to the ground, through a delightful Oslo suburb lined with fabulous designer houses, their occupants all worried about property prices plummeting thanks to an invasion of Brits arguing over whether it’s the next left or not.
We’re eventually drawn to the floodlights like moths and arrive with minutes to spare, only to find about 15 separate training sessions taking place, a (no word of a lie) 20-foot high pile of snow at the side of the pitch, and no goals at either end. Meanwhile, the queue for the sole male toilet is now snaking back about 30 meters, the Schweat having worked its way through our bladders as we circumnavigated Oslo in search of the ground.
The game itself is a little limp. There’s no managerial pep talk that can convince players to treat a dead rubber like the FA Cup Final, and so the first half plays out at a pre-season friendly pace.
The Oslo keeper is flapping like Richard with Google Maps, but we don’t really look like scoring. The ever-energetic Archie Tamplin comes closest to prodding us in front, with a couple of firm strikes in quick succession, but the undoubted highlight of the first half is the waffles and jam being dispensed by some teenagers from a shed in the corner.
There’s no bar in the ground, so some enterprising Rooks fans have brought their own beer and are ingeniously using the shovelled-off snow to keep them chilled.
Meanwhile, having seen some kids mount the slag heap of snow in the first half, Rooks fan Sinclair decides to plant his Rooks flag on the peak at half-time. Alas, he tries to scale the mound from the steepest angle in his Reeboks, and is soon skidding back down K2. This won’t do. British pride is at stake. Sherpas are quickly appointed, Sinclair is sent up the more gentle East Face, and the flag is planted. Much to the bemusement of some Norwegian nine-year-olds who scaled it in a fifth of the time.
Things are sliding downhill on the pitch too. A short back pass gifts the Oslo striker a one-on-one with Nathan Harvey and the hosts take an unexpected lead.
But it doesn’t last long. The keeper flaps once again at a pretty tame shot, and Kieran Murtagh is on hand to pop in an equaliser.
We don’t really build on the momentum, though. In fact, the biggest uncertainty now is whether Oslo are going to score one of the great chances we keep presenting them before the floodlights are switched off.
Thankfully, the game is allowed to run its full course and it ends all square. There’s just time for group hugs and a photo with the players on the pitch, before it’s lights out and the players have to find their way back to the dressing rooms (roughly half a mile away) using smartphone torchlight. Thank Christ Richard wasn’t leading them, or else they’d be in Sweden by now.
All joking aside (“there were jokes in here?” a readership cries), it was another fabulous trip, the kind of jolly not many clubs at our level get to make. And there’s one more in the diary, of course. Italy, we’re coming for you. Assuming we can find you, that is.
Lewes: Harvey, Ming, Penney, Elliott, Oguntayo, Tamplin, Olukoga, Murtagh, Gondoh, Figueira, Wood
Subs: Sablier, Himbury, Lumbombo-Kalala, Vint, Whelpdale, Dreher
Man of the match: Arthur Penney mopped up better than the bloke who cleared the snow off the pitch