Page 117 - 368603 LP250721 AWY AWY AWY Book (238pp A5)

Anyway, there I was alone in my hotel room in the middle of Poland with nobody to talk with about the game and of course that’s one of the important things about being a fan – discussing the game before and after it’s taken place. Luckily I’d passed through the phase of sulking beneath a pillow when Sunderland suffered a bad defeat, so that evening I headed off to one of the few local pubs, called Old Drink (the words ‘a’ and ‘the’ don’t exist in Polish), for my first taste of a solo Saturday night in Plock. It was a sunny spring evening and I turned round to see that even my hotel, the Petropol, which was on the crumbly concrete side but still the best in town back then, looked good.
I had a few pints of Beck’s and admired the proprietor Bonifazy’s charm. He must have been at least sixty and had a large handlebar moustache. His role seemed to be leaning against the bar chatting to customers, especially attractive female ones. Later four drunken Polish guys came in and started knocking back vodkas and chatting to me. As my Polish was very limited indeed I could only make a token response but discovered that Bonifazy’s wife spoke English well and she did some translating for us. It seemed that the most persistent of the four wanted to be my friend. He’d kept ending nearly every sentence with the word ‘kolego (mate)’. This seemed perfectly reasonable, though I’d noticed a certain ironic look in my translator’s eyes as she related this to me. I was further intrigued when another of them appeared to be uttering the word ‘woman’ while pointing towards the nearby toilet and making dodgy-looking motions with his
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