The second game of the day and the third and final fixture of the Wales trip was at Bangor. It’s only a short drive from Caernarfon and the staggered kick-off times meant that seeing both games was easily doable. We’d booked a room at Bangor University and so all I had to do after dropping Jen off was walk the twenty-odd minutes to Bangor City’s Nantporth Stadium.
It was an overcast night and the floodlights were already on when I arrived at the ground. Bangor City are in the second tier of the Welsh pyramid and are a relatively new side, formed as a breakaway from the original Bangor City. The Nantporth Stadium isn’t much older, dating back to 2012.
I’d been going to buy a pie, but when I saw the burgers being cooked on the grill I changed my mind. Six quid got me a meal deal with chips and a can.
I sat in the main stand for the first half. There were plenty of groundhoppers around me with their little backpacks. In fact, more had clocked in at this game on the futbology app than had done at that evening’s Germany world cup fixture. The crowd was announced as 826, which I thought a decent turn out for a drizzly evening with World Cup footie on the telly.
The pitch looked good, probably due to UEFA taking care of it. Croatia also looked good in the early stages and went ahead after twenty minutes with a penalty. Ukraine equalized following a corner within five minutes to the joy of two guys in front of me with their yellow and blue flag and the dedicated group of around twenty of their countrymen behind the goal at the other end.
I moved to the family stand on the other side of the pitch for the second half. This looked to be new and so was probably a UEFA addition. Ukraine took the lead a couple of minutes after the restart. The result could have gone either way at that point with the Ukrainian keeper making some good saves, but a cracking shot close to the hour made it three-one and clinched the points for the Ukrainians.
Trail of the Lion King 
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