Swiss Chores

Anyone who knows me well will be aware of my huge “love” of football *cough* so being asked to head out to Europe for 15 days to cover the UEFA EURO 2008 event had given me sleepless nights for some time. A wonderfully stressful combination of visiting new areas, covering a sport I don’t really follow and trying to understand how to use a whole new distribution system for my images even though what instructions I’ve managed to get are mainly in French was really proving quite challenging. A period of being so far out of my comfort zone that I actually need breathing apparatus is always a good thing to some extent but these two weeks ahead are going to potentially prove to be quite a logistical, physical and mental test.

After a smooth flight, my arrival in Lugano went smoothly aside from trying to enter a roundabout in the wrong direction. Eejits drive on the wrong side out here! Someone should say something..

Not having my accreditation yet results in me being essentially useless so my first evening was spent wandering around my local area, finding out where the Swedish team is based and where they train. I’ve been given the task of following their training and press conferences but shooting the Swiss v Czech, France v Romania, France v Netherlands and France v Italy matches.

My first full day arrived and I managed to blag my way into the Swedish training session where the fun begins. Picture the scene; you don’t follow football, you particularly don’t follow the Swedish National team, they all run around on a field with no numbers or names on while you take their pictures, then you have to caption the shots up with names. Erm.. Help? The only one I’d even vaguely recognise is Freddie Ljungberg and as he wasn’t running around in his Calvin Kleins (thank Christ) even he was proving difficult..

Thankfully, the Swedish press office must be used to football-ignorant types like me and helpfully provided a pretty good crib sheet so the training edit went reasonably smoothly.

The next job was to collect my pass. Now, logistics being someone else’s idea of a good chuckle resulted in my accreditation point being literally at the other end of the country so I jumped in my car and headed up to Zurich. Having already been pre-warned about the somewhat strict nature of Swiss driving rules (including a note that warned that even if there are no Police around, it’s common for members of the public to ring the cops to report traffic violations!), I duly rumbled up the motorways at a reasonable approximation to the speed limits. Despite my best efforts, I rolled into town after a three hour journey at dead on 9 minutes past 6, precisely 9 minutes after the accreditation centre closed. Arse. A quick call finds that the centre in Basel is open a little longer so I head even further away from my base and arrive an hour later at the centre. Pass collected, sandwich bought and legs slapped back into life, I began the journey back through the pouring rain..

A wonderful eight hours sitting in the car today with no breaks. Eight hours. I hurt. The best thing is that tomorrow, I move up to Basel anyway to shoot the opening match. Logistics, eh?

This entry was posted on Friday, June 6th, 2008 at 11:15 pm. It is filed under The working day and tagged with calvin klein, EURO 2008, football, freddie ljungberg, leon neal, lugano, news, photographer, photography, soccer, sport, stress, Switzerland, UEFA, Zlatan Ibrahimovic. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.