Life on the rails: chasing the Euros and the great toilet roll standoff

WITH TEAMS HEADING home from the Euros, journalists have to reckon with the realities of staying on at a month-long tournament

A month into the Euros and I’m still here. I’m not sure how I managed it, but I’ve managed to avoid being sent home by Uefa, despite my best efforts. I’ve also managed to avoid being evicted by my AirBnB host, despite my best efforts on that front, too.

I check out of my Dusseldorf AirBnB on Sunday, which means I am in a kind of stand-off with the owner over the rapidly dwindling stock of toilet roll. With the final roll winnowed close to its cardboard bone and the owner expressing no interest in replacing it, I’m rationing it in the hope I can get to Sunday without needing to buy the four-roll-minimum pack available in the nearest shop. The nation holds its breath.

I’ve already bought detergent and bin bags, so I’ve figured it’s finally time to draw the line.

Uefa don’t accredit me for a game on Monday, so I decide to put my surprise free time to good use, and do some laundry. The AirBnB owner has told me that the building’s washing machines can only be operated using specific tokens, which have to be bought from the janitor, a man whose existence remained a rumour for my first fortnight here. I’ve generally been arriving home from games at around 3am and leaving at around noon in a pre-emptive strike against the Deutsche-Bahn, which are not janitor-amenable hours.

I find him on this day, however, and pay him for a single token. (Reader: if you’re wondering why I’d be so stingy as to pay for just a single token, I re-direct you to the earlier paragraph about toilet roll.)

I find two machines in the basement, one of which was in use. I bundle my clothes into the empty drum but am then bewildered by the German instructions on the face of the machine. I figure ‘express’ looks a solid option, and click that. I return 38 minutes later to find my dirty clothes still dirty, but bone dry. I’ve wasted my single token on a dryer.

Demoralised, I scoop up my clothes and go looking for the janitor to buy another token. He’s gone home. Great.

I have an early train to Leipzig on Tuesday morning for Austria v Turkiye, and I buy a couple of new t-shirts once I get there, remembering the good-sense economics of scrimping on washing machine tokens. (There’s an allegory for Germany’s lack of infrastructure investment in there somewhere.)

Eagle-eyed readers will realise that the opening pars to my piece from Austria/Turkiye had a surprising amount of washing machine-based imagery – this is what we call displacement.

Still, my mood is improved by the sheer smugness of correctly predicting that Austria/Turkiye would be worth going to: it proved as wild and anarchic as I thought it might. The slight downside is the fact the press box in Leipzig is in the lower tier of the stand, which leaves us vulnerable to anything falling from above. Hence one of my new t-shirts is soaked in celebratory Turkish beer. I cannot sustain this level of attrition.

My general mood collapses the next morning when Uefa politely email to say my applications for Germany/Spain and England/Switzerland could not be accepted. Fuck!

Germany/Spain has a naturally high demand and is being held in one of the smaller venues, Stuttgart, so I can understand being too far down the priority list. I apply for the waiting list for France/Portugal on the same night, but I am not holding my breath.

But England? Do they not know that one of our national sports is Hoping England Lose?

Being a football journalist without any football to cover is, of course, an existential issue, and it throws up several problems. What is the point of being here? Am I just going to be covering this tournament off the TV? And, if so, how the hell will my toilet roll ration plan deal with this unplanned increase in AirBnB dwell time?

I fire off several emails to Uefa, missives of anger leavened with a dollop of self-pity. I spend Wednesday evening sitting in front of my laptop, desperately refreshing my emails. All of a sudden I feel there’s a massive party going on around me, to which I’m not invited. The non-Euros sporting landscape is bleak: I flick on Eurosport Deutschland and find they are showing a full repeat of the 2024 world snooker final.

I sleep uneasily through Wednesday night but wake up on Thursday determined to do something. I go out to the media accreditation centre in Dusseldorf, with a vague sense that I’ll tell someone that I won’t leave until I have answers, goddammit. This kind of assertiveness doesn’t come easily to me but desperate times will change a

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