The last few days have been manic. First of all, the flag isn't going to be finished to our spec in time. In fairness to the company who have been working on it, they admitted defeat & put us in touch with a firm in Newcastle who can salvage as much as possible of it, but its highly unlikely that it will contain images that we wanted it to. However, we have settled on a design that will hopefully convey the message that we want it to & Deano has taken it upon himself to get t-shirts done now, so hopefully we can put something together. I was hoping the flag would get to make its debut at Goodison on saturday, when I'm at the Everton v Norwich game, but that's not going to happen now. There is still an outside chance of it being at Goodison when we play Arsenal next Wednesday, but if not, it'll definitely be coming to City v Everton. Despite all of our clubs playing in blue & white, we've opted for a green & white flag, as wee Oscar's a Celtic fan. How that will go down on the Friday night,when we're at Hamburg (who have big links to Rangers, whilst their city rivals St.Pauli have even bigger links with Celtic) remains to be seen
The colours however,I expect will be welcome at Easter Road for the Edinburgh derby. When I finished the first blog, I mentioned that our ever-evolving (I've used that term a lot throughout this process) itinerary may be changing to take in Hibs-Hearts. I contacted Hibs & asked them to flout their rules a little to allow us to purchase said tickets & they obliged, so we now kick off a day earlier.A massive thank you to Hibernian Football Club for keeping all 7 countries alive. Where there's a will, there's a way. It'll be a bit surreal for me, as I'll have to get home afterwards, go to work early Monday morning, before rejoining the lads in Newcastle.(If anyone reading this has a connection at Red Bull, who may be interested in trialling an IV drip during this process, put them in touch with me, please)
Jamie & Dean,meanwhile,having been booked on a train from Stevenage to Newcastle on the Monday, will be travelling to Edinburgh instead on the Sunday. I also mentioned on the last blog that their ticket was non-refundable. So we've lost £80, whilst spending another £200 on match tickets, travel & digs. every action has a reaction, so we have to shave that off the other end of the budget.
I deliberately left the travel clear between landing in Eindhoven on the Friday morning & flying out of Charleroi Sunday morning. This was to give us a little flexibility & allowed us to trade Heracles v Utrecht for Ajax v Groningen & go to Hamburg on the Friday. I've been to Amsterdam on 4 occasions but never for football, so, ever since we dropped Bayern Munich from our itinerary, this was the highlight for me. Unfortunately, Ajax have a policy of charging non-Dutch citizens an absolute fortune, & coupling that with the costs of a train from Hamburg to Amsterdam, to then leave & travel to Belgium for an early morning flight, that looks like where we make up the shortfall in our budget, by heading for a Belgian game instead.
So we go back to Standard Liege v Charleroi, as its en route, only to find that this is another victim of late fixture changes (BBC football & Statto websites are still reporting it as saturday 8th, so it must be recent). So, at the time of writing, our most feasible option to round it all off is Mons v Anderlecht, as they are geographically the closest club to our flight home (obviously excluding Charleroi, who are at Liege)That'll be that 'ever-evolving' itinerary again. Who knows where we'll be going by this time tomorrow?
Before I finish off, I have to mention the reaction to my first blog. A lot of people I've spoken to since have mentioned that only some of the links to Oscar's pages worked, so I'll try & get them all right this time around. However, the biggest positive for me was people taking a bit of an interest in Oscar's story & being moved to donate to his justgiving page ( http://www.justgiving.com/OscarAppeal ) . As a result of this, I've thought about setting up our own Justgiving page for friends & family to donate & seeing what we can raise ourselves. As I said previously in the blog, we are funding this entire trip ourselves & the idea of asking people for money while we swan off across Europe is crass.The sole purpose of the flag was to raise awareness for Oscar's story. However, some pride must be swallowed,as Oscar & his family deserve all the help they can get, so I will ensure tomorrow's update (a much briefer version, I hope, although I've always said "why use 1 word when 1000 will do?") contains a link to our own justgiving page. I just hope its not too late in the day for us to raise a decent amount before we set off. Meantime, read Oscar's main blog (http://oscarknox.blogspot.co.uk/), donate via that page, follow him on Twitter (https://twitter.com/Wee_Oscar)& like him on Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/OscarKnoxAppeal)
Once you've done that, spread the word
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