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BEING BELGIAN: You still can’t escape the Rovers!

Apologies for the delay. Being Belgian comes to you a little later than usual this week as your author is just back from Dublin’s fair city where this weekend Shamrock super hoops Rovers won the 16^th title of the club’s illustrious history. Boo-ya!

Having led for much of the season, the hooped ones crawled over the finishing line just three goals to the good on goal difference from northside rivals Bohemians after an excruciating 2-2 draw against Bray 112^th best place to live in Ireland Wanderers.  Only two seasons after moving into their new Tallaght home, it is the start of what the Hoops faithful hope will be a new era of dominance. As the long suffering green and white disciples sing: 

“Four in a Row, we won four in a Row.” 

They did, but that was in the 1980s! Since then there was the magnificent one in a row in 1994 and a cup final defeat in a row in 2002 against Derry you’re Brits and you know you are! City. How sweet therefore, that in 2010 they may actually end the years of hurt with the double. They take on Sligo is surprising Town in the Cup Final on 14 November. 

Whatever the result against a tough Sligo side, the Champions League 2011 campaign should be a piece of cake, on the evidence of the recent narrow defeats against Juventus what cup size takes your fancy ref Turin and Real Franco had nothing to do with our success honest Madrid. The faithful will be hoping to dust down their old Del Piero/C Ronaldo favourite: 

“You’ll ne-v-er play for Ro-vers”. 

First, however, they will have to get their hands dirty against the likes of the pride of Lithuania or Latvia, before potentially progressing to a possible (more conditionals than in David Beckham’s shower unit! (think about it...)) final knock-out round clash against the cream of Belgium. 

Which Belgian team awaits Rovers is a long way from conclusion but this weekend there was what had the feeling of a potentially decisive shootout at the top between Genk and Anderlecht, and in the subtop between Club Brugge and Standard. The second Super Sunday in a month! 

While Brugge and Standard shot each other in the foot in a 2-2 draw, Anderlecht travelled to Genk to take on the surprise leaders. It was a game that pitched ex Anderlecht player and manager Frankie Vercauteren against his one time assistant manager there Ariel Jacobs. The events of 2007, when Vercauteren got his Anderlecht P45 and Jacobs assumed the reins, obviously still rankle as the two men refused to name their side until two minutes before kick-off, declined to shake hands before or after the match, and simply wouldn’t sit side by side at the post match press conference to discuss Anderlecht’s 2-1 win. Keep on fighting lads, we’ve got you just where we want you… 

….You’ll never beat the Rovers! 

Results below, table here:

Racing Genk 1-2 Anderlecht

Club Brugge 2-2 Standard Liege

Charleroi 0-0 Kortrijk

Eupen 2-2 Lierse

AA Gent 3-1 KV Mechelen

Germinal Beerschot 0-0 Sint Truiden

Zulte Waregem 1-1 Lokeren

Westerlo 2-1 Cercle Brugge

BEING BELGIAN: Sometimes it’s better than Being Dutch!

There is a town called Baarle. No, in fact there is a town called Baarle-Hertog, which is Belgian, and a town called Baarle-Nassau, which is Dutch. Except they are one town really, several miles north of Belgium. Seriously! The border separating Baarle from Baarle is not like those silly straight Saharan lines between Algeria and Mali or Niger, or the seemingly stencilled extremities of Wyoming. This border runs cock-a-hoop through houses, gardens and streets, it cuts parking metres in half before doubling back to do the same to the space it metres. Homes are dissected, each household's nationality determined by the location of its front door. Families sleep in different countries, often they don’t know which, they go to the toilet abroad. Twenty-two (22) pockets of Belgium are entirely surrounded by Holland. But, as the BBC notes, within those pockets are more enclaves, which are Dutch. Godverdomme, that’s complicated shiznit man!

“One local mother named Vivian was forced by her husband's national pride into an international relocation.

"I am Dutch and my daughter is Belgian because my husband is Belgian," she says.

"But he won't live in Holland. He won't have a yellow number plate on his car. So we had to move countries. But it was not so far." 

Several kilometers to the west, there is the southernmost section of Dutch province Zeeland (that of New Zealand fame). While not quite displaying a Baarlesque bipolarity it does have its issues. It doesn’t quite touch the rest of the Netherlands but shares a rather long border with Belgium. All of which means that your author knows a fellow from Zeeland who supports both Feyenoord and Club Bruges. Feyenoord because he’s Dutch. Club Bruges because its closer, because he can go to a game there without getting into a boat. And because (I’ve always wanted to start a sentence with ‘and because’!) it’s handy whenever Feyenoord have just lost 10-0 to PSV Eindhoven (ten-nil). Godverdomme that’s quite a beating man! 

Belgian results below, Dutch table here:

Anderlecht 2-0 Westerlo

Cercle Brugge 2-1 Eupen

Lokeren 0-1 Club Brugge

KV Mechelen 5-1 Germinal Beerschot

Kortrijk 1-0 Racing Genk

Lierse 0-0 Zulte Waregem

Sint Truiden 3-2 Charleroi

Standard Liege 2-1 AA Gent

BEING BELGIAN: Dass (team) ist wahnsinn!

When the Austrians rolled into Brussels to take on the Red Devils last Tuesday it did not evoke quite the same sense of trepidation amongst the local population as when the Germans arrived earlier this season. It wasn’t always thus. As everybody surely knows, the Austrians have been here before and have not always been so quick to head home. Following some kerfuffle or other the Treaty of Utrecht (signed in 1713) ceded the Spanish (or Southern) Netherlands to Austria. Although the Austrians had relatively little interest in their Netherlands they stayed for about 80 years until in 1794 the region was overrun by France and the Austrians pranced off back to Vienna with their Opera glasses (perhaps it was because they couldn’t see the stage very well that, on 25 August 1830, after a performance at the Brussels opera, a riot erupted, quickly followed by uprisings elsewhere in the country, and the Belgian Revolution led to the country’s independence. Perhaps!). But back to last Tuesday evening and the Red Devils’ most heroic battle in years. 4-4 it ended, a game that evoked memories of the football of yore. Over the top, appeared the tactical instructions from both coaches. Belgium went one up early doors, through Jelle Vossen, the sharp shooting Genk centre forward, but Austrian schemer, Franz Schiemer, and marksman, Marko Arnautović, each struck to leave Belgium adrift at the break. Shortly into the second period sober haired Marouane Fellaini headed Belgium level but Schiemer put Austria back ahead before team mate Scharner got himself needlessly sent off, leaving Das Team (I kid you not, the imagination of these Austrians is endless) a man down with a quarter of the game to go. It took until 5 minutes to the end for Belgium to press home its numerical advantage, Genk striker Marvin Ogunjimi turning the ball home after good work from Eden Hazard. Pandemonium, a bit like the bar at the U2 gig at the same stadium nights earlier. In the 90th minute, St Petersburg player Nicolas Lombaerts nodded the 4-3 into the onion sack. Delirium, unlike anything seen since the 4-3 against the USSR in Mexico 86. Until German born, Stuttgart player, Martin Harnik equalised in the 93^rd minute. Depression, comparable to that of fans of any team other than Genk when they look at the current Jupiler league table. 

Results below, table here:

Zulte Waregem 2 – 3 Club Brugge

Westerlo 1 – 1 KV Mechelen

Eupen 6 – 0 Sint Truiden

Charleroi 1 – 2 Lokeren

AA Gent 2 – 0 Kortrijk

Germinal Beerschot 1 – 1 Lierse

Racing Genk 4 - 2 Standard Liege

Cercle Brugge 1 - 0 Anderlecht

BEING BELGIAN: It's Super Sunday!

The distance between Ostend (Belgium) and Folkestone (Kent, England, UK) is a mere 121.8 kilometres (75.68 miles or 65.72 nautical miles) and it is therefore unsurprising that occasionally infections arrive on Belgian shores from perfidious Albion. In this instance a desire to split the weekend's football action into an implied Shit Saturday yet Super Sunday! This weekend Belgium fell prey to a Sunday of Club Brugge vs AA Gent - the derby of Flanders - and Standard Liege vs RSCA Anderlecht - quite possibly the derby of Belgium. A weekend of Frankie Goes To Hollywood's 'Two Tribes', all it lacked was Richard 'the lionheart' Keyes telling us that it was the most significant thing to happen in Belgium since the Battle of the Golden Spurs. In 1302, just to put things into some perspective. A militia of guild workers from the Flemish cities defeated the, even at that time, frog eating French, removing their spurs for good measure, and ending Philip the Fair's desire to conquer Flanders. Today the region is split into 5 provinces, two of them eponymous - East (capital Gent) and West (capital Brugge) Flanders. Last season Gent humiliated Brugge 6-2 in a game that had appeared to mark an almost definitive shifting of power from traditionally dominant West to newly empowered East. This (Super) Sunday Brugge came out of the blocks determined to set things straight, Kouemaha, Geraerts and Vargas easing 'Blue-Black' into a 3-0 lead within the first half hour. Yassine El Ghanassy scored for Gent before half time to give The Buffalos hope. Bernd Thijs got a second for them from a deflected free kick in the second half but Brugge held out to give Dutch coach Adrie Koster some welcome respite after a series of reverses. Meanwhile in the south of the country - where the Battle of the Golden Spurs enjoys somewhat less of a following (it has even been insinuated that the Francophone Walloons were sympathetic to the French enemy. Not here, I add hastily...) - Anderlecht visited Standard Liege in a match that saw the two biggest supported teams in the country, the two most recent Champions, the two largest rivals, go head to head. 5-1 Liege, BOOM! A seismic shift in power, Standard back within a point of Anderlecht. The big winners may well have been Racing Genk who were not even playing on this Stupendous Sunday. They extended their lead at the top of the table to five points having come from two down to draw with fifth placed KV Mechelen.

Results below, table here.

KV Mechelen 2 -2 Racing Genk

Lierse 0 - 1 Cercle Brugge

Lokeren 1 - 0 Germinal Beerschot

Kortrijk 1 - 0 Eupen

Sint Truiden 1 - 2 Westerlo

Zulte Waragem 1 - 1 Charleroi

Club Brugge 3 - 2 AA Gent

Standard Liege 5 - 1 Anderlecht

BEING BELGIAN: It's Sods Law!

Being Belgian having stuck it to the Russians last week, obviously Zenit St Petersburg were going to come to Brussels on Wednesday, stroll around a bit, stick the ball in the Anderlecht net three times, and have their commentator on Россия-1, as lost as anyone for famous Belgians, declare:

Eddy Merckx, Eddy Merckx, Eddy Merckx, Eddy Merckx, Eddy Merckx, We have beaten him all. Eddy Merckx, Eddy Merckx, Eddy Merckx, can you hear me Eddy, can you hear me? Your boys took one hell of a beating tonight!

Little would he have known, our imaginary Russian friend, how much it would have hurt. For Eddy ‘the Cannibal’ Merckx is a Brussels Boy, a Ketje, and Anderlecht fan. He even has his own metro station in the commune.

This week, his Anderlecht sought redemption of sorts against KV Kortrijk, at the unusual start time of 9pm on Sunday evening. The reason for the delayed kick-off: car free Sunday in Brussels, which keeps everything but Eddy Merckx’s favourite form of transport out of the 19 Brussels communes, of which Anderlecht is the largest, until 8pm one Sunday every September. In a country seemingly fixated on the small – its two major tourist attractions are after all a statue of a small boy relieving himself and a rather large reconstruction of the smallest thing existing (yes I know they can split it now but let’s not split hairs!) – they think big with Europe’s largest car free day.

As the cars and the team buses rolled back into Brussels, Genk had already beaten Lokeren 3-1 to put the pressure firmly on Anderlecht to keep the distance between the two teams to only two points. It was a test they didn’t fail, Lukaku, Legear and Boussoufa scoring in a facile 3-0 win.

Elsewhere there were goals galore as Franky Dury’s Gent beat his old charges Zulte Waragem 5 – 3, while Club Brugge finally delivered on their promise in humiliating Les Zèbres 5-0 in Charleroi.

Results and match highlights below, table here.

KV Mechelen 1 – 0 Standard Liege

Cercle Bruges 4 – 2 Sint Truiden

Westerlo 2 – 0 Lierse

Eupen 0 – 1 Germinal Beerschot

Racing Genk 3 – 1 Lokeren

Charleroi 0 – 5 Club Brugge

Gent 5 – 3 Zulte Waragem

Anderlecht 3 - 0 KV Kortrijk