Fernando

Fortuna Sittard  1  ADO Den Haag  0 

Eredivisie

Somewhere in our garage is a box full of old VHS video tapes, I don’t know why we keep them as we are never going to acquire a video recorder and watch them ever again.

They vary somewhat from goals and highlights of Derby County season 1989-90, through to a live recording of the Happy Mondays at the G-Mex (in fact – has anyone got a VHS player, I wouldn’t mind seeing that again?).

Also amongst them are some recordings of TV programmes, and one of them is a recording of a current affairs programme about football violence. I’ve got this as one of my assignments at university was on the said subject matter. I can vividly remember that a large part of the programme was devoted to following a section of English football supporters travelling abroad for a European game.

That club was Everton, it was 1984-85 and in the Quarter Final of the Cup Winners Cup they’d drawn Dutch outfit Fortuna Sittard. The score was 3-0 from the first leg at Goodison so it was something of a party as the coach travelled over the water, and from memory, two things stood out from the video.

How small and cramped the stadium was, and, a large group of British squaddies turned up at the game who were stationed just over the border in Germany, and that did create quite a bit of angst amongst the local plodstabulary.

So, whenever I see Fortuna Sittard, I think Everton and I think about that video, that is still sat in a box, in the garage in fact right underneath me as I type this!

The fact that Fortuna were playing in the Cup Winners Cup was something of a surprise at the time, they’ve had a few seasons in the top flight of Dutch football but never pulled up any trees, although winning the Dutch Cup in 1984 was indeed the ticket to their one and only foray into Europe.

Victories over KB of Denmark and Wisla Krakow of Poland took them to the Everton tie, but since then the bulk of their time has been spent in the second tier. They won promotion at the end of the 2017-18 season after finishing runners-up to Jong Ajax, who could not be promoted, and as a result they were back in top flight for the first time since 2002.

Last season saw them finish a point clear of the relegation places after being one of the favourites for the drop. While this time around, on the eve of the game they sat just inside the drop zone, playing a side from Den Haag who were just above them in the table, so in some ways it was a six pointer even at this stage of the season.

The journey from Aachen was very straightforward, and after a minor altercation with a local over a parking space, we took a brief detour to the car park that sits right beneath the stadium, a bargain for just 5 Euro. With it being too early to purchase tickets we elected to head to a newly opened all you can eat buffet, which did both the job of providing sustenance, and also killing a bit of time before the game.

Suitably stuffed on a combination of Chinese, Italian and Dutch delicacies, it was simply a case of wandering round the corner to the main entrance where tickets were purchased with no problems whatsoever. It seems that despite earning a long awaited promotion to the Eredivisie, crowds rarely sell out at the 12,500 capacity Fortuna Sittard Stadium.

Fortuna moved to the stadium, which sits on the edges of the town, in 1999, after having previously played (against Everton) at De Baandert which was close to the centre of the town. It’s not untypical in it’s construction, with four box style stands adorning the sides of the pitch.

Before kick off we had a quick snifter in the Supporters Home, that in all fairness was a little tamer than the one we visited in Helmond, but after just the one, it was time to head into the ground.

We chose our seats opposite the main stand, but to be fair, it wasn’t necessary to sit in your allocated spot, plenty of space was available with a crowd of a touch over 8,000 present. To our left was an end that was split between home and away fans while to the right was the home end, now known as the Fernando Ricksen Stand, where the vocal fanatics base themselves.

Ricksen is idolised in Sittard, his home town and the club he once played for. Before the game a burst of Abba’s ‘Fernando’ is played over the PA system, while the club shop contains plenty of Sittard / Ricksen related memorabilia.

Ricksen tragically passed away recently at the young age of 43, from motor neurone disease, and perhaps one of the most emotional pieces of television you can see is available on You Tube, where Ricksen announced live on a Dutch TV chat show that he was suffering from the awful illness. He was no saint by any means, with various demons, but his charity raised over £1 million to the cause, and his death in a hospice in Airdrie was a sad end to a life lived to the full.

The game was entertaining, and very close. The only goal came five minutes before the interval when Sittard’s Amadou Ciss found the net after good work from Martin Angha. The visitors from the Hague pressed late in the game but resolute defending from Fortuna kept the clean sheet and earned them the three points that could be so critical come the end of the campaign.

Escape from the ground and indeed the car park at the end was pretty easy and within an hour and a half we were pulling up on Theo’s drive back in Duiven. This meant we could visit two pubs before bedtime, the first being ‘Neighbours Bar’ where if you ask nicely you can get a pint rather than the typical half. Some of the locals looked like they’d been in all day, swigging from bottles of champagne and generally lurching about, so we headed over to De Tol for a couple of late ones, where the night was spent talking to another fella called Theo who was a massive enthusiast of trial biking. I now know quite a bit about the subject, in addition to my previous knowledge of the fact Peter Purves used to present a programme called ‘Kick Start’ on BBC.

A very enjoyable night at Fortuna Sittard, don’t suppose anyone has a VHS player they can lend me?