Basel 1-1 Ludogorets Razgrad (2016)

Basel 1-1 Ludogorets Razgrad
UEFA Champions League
Tuesday 13th September 2016

When it comes to Swiss football, there aren't too many teams who immediately spring to mind.

Grasshoppers and Young Boys are both worthy of a mention due to their simply brilliant names, whilst others who may be remembered by English supporters are FC Zurich (on the basis that Zurich is a big city in Switzerland), Thun, who once got walloped by Arsenal in the Champions League, and St Gallen, who knocked a star-studded Chelsea team out of the UEFA Cup in the 2000s.

Sascha Studer; Mansfield's goalkeeper for part of the 2014/15 campaign - the worst I've experienced in football, also played for Aarau and Winterthur before venturing to these shores.

However, undoubtedly the best of the bunch are Basel. The Joggeli have been regulars in the Champions League throughout the past two decades and also a starting point for several players who've gone on to bigger and better things in their careers. The biggest name, in retrospect, to have pulled on their 'Red & Blue' kit in recent times is a certain Egyptian striker called Mo Salah.

My first memories of Basel stem from 2002/03 when they drew 3-3 and infamously knocked Liverpool out of the Champions League in their final Group Stage match with a side which had Hakan Yakin, Pascal Zuberbuhler, Timothee Atouba and Bernt Haas, amongst others, in it.

Anyway, three-and-a-half years ago, I was planning a road trip around Europe and everything seemed to drop perfectly into place when they qualified for the Champions League and were handed a home tie against Ludogorets Razgrad on the first matchday. Tickets were easy enough to get (even though it was one of the very rare instances I had to purchase them through Viagogo) and it cost just under £15 for a seat in the family section amongst the home fans.

I'd arrived in Switzerland following an overnight coach trip from Amsterdam which took 12 hours and was very memorable because when passing through Luxembourg in the early hours, the authorities thought it would be a good idea to stop the vehicle and frog-march all the passengers into a classroom to be sniffed by Scooby Doo - in the hope they'd find drugs on one of us. I don't know if they actually found anything on anyone but it didn't half f**k up my chances to get some sleep - thus meaning by the time we got to Switzerland the next morning, I was very knackered.

After a brief stroll around the city during the morning followed by a couple of hours kip at my hostel in the mid-afternoon, by the evening I felt refreshed enough to 'go again' and head down to St Jakob Park for the game.

Once inside the stadium, it was pretty stage and you could move about freely between the different tiers in the stand - hence some decent photos for a change. Even at 7.00pm, it was still sweltering weather outside which meant I had to go to the snack bars where there was a surcharge for a drinks cup (which you got refunded if you took it back at the end of the game) plus an inflated cost for the drink itself - thus meaning it was like 10 Swiss Francs for a Coca-Cola. Therefore, I can only assume those running the catering stalls must assume lots of wealthy Swiss bankers come to watch FC Basel.

On the pitch, it proved to be one of those frustrating nights as Bulgarian champions Ludogorets - unfancied and unfashionable in equal measure, put in a dogged performance to demonstrate why they might not be the Group Stage whipping boys as everyone expected them to be.

Jonathan Cafu (not the same one who won the World Cup with Brazil) sent the visiting fans into raptures by bagging the opener on the stroke of half-time and from that point onward, Basel toiled, laboured and didn't really look as though they'd get back into things. During the closing stages of the contest, Renato Steffen struck an equaliser to spare the hosts' blushes (and at least reduce some of the moaning and groaning amongst the home crowd), but there was no doubt this was a big two points dropped. The other two teams in the group, Paris Saint-Germain and Arsenal, were always well-fancied and super hot favourites to make a comfortable passage to the knockout stages.

Ludogorets eventually finished in third position in the group - drawing the return game in Bulgaria and crucially picking up a point on their trip to Paris. Basel lost all four games against the 'big two' so missed out on default entry into the UEFA Europa League.