England lost - Robbie won!

After a long busride we arrived at the magnificent stadium of Nya Ullevi, Gothenburg. Where we waited. And waited. And waited...
In the midst of all our waiting, England failed to succeed in the World Cup (wipe that smirk off your faces, Børge and DevilMood!), and depressed us to no little extent.
We were also wondering what the effect might be on Robbie, knowing how mad he is about football. The support band came on. They're probably really, really famous, but I'd never heard of them - The Basement Jaxx (ok, hit me now). They were, at best, very energetic. And obviously prepared to make the best out of supporting Mr. Robbie Williams. But really - supporting is very unrewarding. They did earn 4 huge rounds of applause, every time because they announced they were leaving...

Eventually they left. So we waited some more. After sitting down in the bus 4 hours, and then standing up in the stadium for another 4 hours, I was honestly beginning to wonder if it was all worth it?
Then Robbie came on. All doubts aside...

Robbie is amazing. Really - I mean, I like a lot of his songs, but he could probably be singing Baa Baa Black Sheep and leave the audience feeling the same way. He may be a lot of other things, but he's definitely a born entertainer! After a couple of songs, where I felt he wasn't really there, he came clean - asked us if we could feel his pain after England's exit. Of course we could... And by the comfort of 57,245 in the audience (a sell-out, as it was the following night. The only others to sell out two nights in a row were Springsteen, Sting and Stones. And as Robbie said - "I'm the only one under a hundred"... Admittedly, U2 never tried having more than one show, moving on to Stockholm for the next.) Robbie gave us all he had. Which is A LOT. And in case anybody wonders - there were a lot of guys there too. I didn't even see a lot of fourteen year old girls, and there were about 40 per cent guys, my guess would be. A lot of couples, a lot of Really Old People (like me, 37 - or Robbie, 32) - quite a few in their 40's and 50's, quite a few of any age, actually.

At one point I realised that Denmark had shipped all its tallest men to Sweden, and they were all standing in front of me with their tiny girlfriends. But suddenly they all vacated the area (we were at a fence, about 50 metres / 160 feet from the stage) and we were left in clear view of Robbie. (The close-up is from one of the papers, the others are mine..) And, after another few songs, his "bestest friend in the whole, wide world", Jonathan Wilkes. Now - except for the local newspaper, all Swedish papers gave the show their highest marks. But none of them had much good to say about Jonny's appearance. We quite enjoyed it, though, their having a kind of football shoot-out competition in the midst of it all... Also, their performance of "their" song, Me and my shadow, wasn't that great, but here's a sample anyway:

Robbie claimed he didn't say it on every concert. Then he stated we were the best audience on the tour so far. Whether it was true or not, it didn't particularly make for a worse atmosphere... He also claimed that "you're all f*ing gorgeous! Even the guys are better looking than me!! Thank God I can sing..."

He obviously did more encores than he'd planned to, so we must have made him feel better after England's loss... The whole thing ended in fireworks and whatnot, and everyone were extatic. Yes, my hubby had also screamed his voice hoarse, as had I...

Arriving at our house, Sunday morning around 5 AM (...) we found this note on the door: Jakob had taped it to the front door to make sure we saw. And even though it broke our hearts to see two of our Liverpool heros had missed, at least it was the Chelsea player whose name was spelled incorrectly.

Oh yes, the kids had been fine with the babysitters all along, and I did get to sleep in...