Holland - It's goodbye from us

AND so we head home.

Albion's defeat to Koln might have looked bad but it wasn't the end of the world.

Okay so the defending had a touch of the Laurel and Hardy about it but the players were shattered after being given a 'good beasting' (the words of fitness coach Dan Harris) on Friday.

And it didn't help that the walk from the Euskirchen dressing rooms to the pitch took about 15 minutes.

The athletics stadium had that quaint feel to it that you only get in pre-season. On the one side we had what amounted to a 'main stand', while on the other we had park benches dotted around - I'm sure there was a tramp asleep on one of them - with vendors selling Bratwurst, a green mess which resembled battered cabbage and a lager/coke concoction, which looked as bad as it sounds and probably tasted worse.

Sadly, camp compere Georg van den Hoovel, who conducted the most surreal of press conferences at the previous game, was not present otherwise he could have defused matters when it all got a little nasty.

In their infinite wisdom the stewards placed rows of chairs on the running track for the two sets of coaching staff and players. Good idea.- until some bright spark forgot that it might rain.

And it did. So much so that the organisers wheeled out four huge umbrellas - the kind you get in 'smoking areas' of pubs - and plonked them in front of the main stand to keep both sets of coaches and subs dry.

Sadly this meant that only those of us with x-ray vision could see what was going on on the pitch. Matters weren't helped by the fact that the German press had already sneaked into a small media room, grabbing the last of the power points. (I could make a gag about Germans getting up early to claim the best seats by draping their lap top bags over the desks, but I won't)

However all wasn't well. Herr Angry from Koln was not happy. Seeing the umbrellas, our moustachioed friend stood up and shook his fist at the stewards in a pique of German anger I've not seen since Oz was upsetting the locals on the Dusseldorf building site in Auf Wiedersehen, Pet.

The umbrellas came down when the showers stopped. Which is just as well otherwise I would have had no idea what the score was.

This was all too much for a group of Albion fans who had clearly been sampling the Warsteiner in nearby Bier Kellers. Expecting the players to emerge from the tunnel, our friends from the Black Country had camera phones poised and ready to film the teams emerging. Which would have been a great idea had the players not already sneaked onto the pitch from behind one of the goals. It wa like being back at the old Wembley. And to top it all we were treated to a collection of Germany's finest stadium rock before the game.

Germans with bad hair and moustaches, stadium rock, the prospect of hooliganism - it was all too 1983 for my liking.

At the end fans invaded the pitch and Koln player Tobias Nickenig ended the game with a souvenir he probably didn't want.

After much back-slapping and signing of autographs,. Tobias walked back to the dressing room blissfully unaware that a mischievous Englishman had scrawled WBA on his back...