If Heineken did rugby

So it's thursday in sunny old Ceret and billy no mates has nothing planned for friday night, except watching the rugby on sky sports. To achieve this, I only have to convince the family that it will be more fun than that film with George Clooney in it.

The phone rings and I am suddenly not billy no mates any more and whats more, I'm going the USAP to watch them play the Northampton Saints. Yeah baby.

So friday evening arrives and as promised my friends arrive and I'm not driving. We make our way over to Perpignan and park with ease, some 100m from the ground. Things are going well and we find a nice bar just outside the ground to start soaking up the atmosphere. I'm there in a bar full of Northampton supporters with my USAP cap and chatting away.

15mins before kick off we wander the last 50m to the ground an make our way past the very pretty ticket collector who is trying out her school girl English on the overseas punters. There really is something nice about the French talking English.

Anyway I digress, we get our tokens for the beer go to the bar - no queue - and make our way to our seats. Now we bump into Jon Hesford, who has come with some friends from Domain Treloar (see my blog from a few days ago) so we have a chat about wine for a while and make our way into the bear pit.

The cheer leaders are on the pitch giving it their all and then all of a sudden the crowd erupts in a cacophony of noise to welcome the visitor. It's just like a gladiatorial arena, the noise was amazing.

Great game of rugby that could have been won by either side but in the second half USAP pull out a commanding lead and take the honours 29 - 13. By the way, I forgot to mention that as you know, when you have a few beers there is a need to remove the excess liquid. Normally this is greeted by a 10 minute wait in a queue for a smelly hole in the ground. Not at USAP here there are no queues, shared facilities and private cubicles, how good is that.....Anyway after the game, we still had a few tokens left, so we popped back to the bar for a quick one for the road. No queues again. Half way through our Demi, the barman leans over and asks whether we would like another beer. We point out that we are fine, as we have now used up all our tokens. No Monsieur you do not understand, would you like a FREE beer.

OK so we have stood up again and said thank you very much (well dragged up me) and are now merrily supping on free beer, at which point the bar lady (did I mention that she was also very pretty) leans over and asks whether we would like a baguette with our choice of filling. Yup you guest it, she is also offering us her wears for free. So politely saying thank you again, we now have our free beer and baguettes, good company and .....

I then notice that someone has kindly left the gate to the pitch wide open, well it would be rude not to, so ther we are at 11:30 at night, wandering round the hallowed turf of Aimé Giral with free beer and food to hand.

As we walk across the pitch, some of us are hailed by a couple of young ladies, who turn out to be cheerleaders and would really like to have their picture taken wiz some Englis men on the pitch.................Time to end and contemplate about whether this was truly a Heineken rugby event. That depends on whether they can do something about my hangover.

It was great to see some 2000 Northampton supporters who made a great vocal contribution to the match and displayed an eery quite respect when there was a conversion attempt. Great ambassadors for the game.

Next time, why not make a proper visit to the region and tarry a while longer.

And finally, our man of the match award goes to Dennis, Geoff's Godfather who travelled all the way down by train to watch the match.