An East Kilbride man drove several hundred kilometres from Dubai to Qatar to see France dump England out of the World Cup quarter-finals – and says it was worth it.
Former Kilby winger Kevin Wilson, 34, and his English wife Charlotte found themselves with gold-dust tickets and decided to take in the big game.
And though his wife of a month is from down South, Wilson admits he took some relish in seeing the Auld Enemy tumble out of the tournament, with Harry Kane famously smashing a penalty over the bar.
The whole adventure took more than 24 hours, driving four-and-a-half hours from Dubai to Saudi Arabia and two hours to get to the Qatar border, only to be wrongly told their car-park permit wasn’t valid.
That meant driving back the two hours across Saudi, past “Hummers parked every kilometre with a rocket launcher in the back of it, with a machine gun”, to a car-park, where a passing Qatar citizen took pity on them and drove them back to the border and an hour into Doha to the stadium car park.
Nearly 13 hours after first setting off, the Wilsons arrived at their hotel, dumped their stuff and made their way to the Bedouin tent-inspired Al Bayt Stadium, to watch history unfold.
Aurelien Tchouameni gave France the lead, Kane levelled with a penalty. Olivier Giroud restored the Blues’ lead, only for England to be awarded a second penalty, with the Spurs striker this time firing over.
Former Duncanrig Secondary pupil Kevin said: “We finally got to bed at about 3.15am, so I think that will be roughly 20 hours from waking up to going to sleep... then woke up at 10am the next morning and did it all again to come home.
“It was class, we absolutely loved it. My missus is from Essex, and she’s not massive on her football, but she’ll get invested in it for the World Cups and things like that.
“I think if it had been a 0-0 draw and we had driven all that way she would probably have killed me, but it was a really good game, it was tight, there was drama, obviously Harry Kane missed the penalty, there were VAR decisions and dodgy refereeing.
“We left at 7.30am and got back at 10pm the next night and people were asking if it was worth it.
“To say we’ve done it and the quality of game it was, I’d say it definitely was.”
As a France shirt-wearing Scot, Kevin admits he enjoyed seeing England exit the competition.
“I took massive pleasure when Kane put the penalty over the bar,” he said.
“Charlotte has pictured of me when the first goal went in and I tried to remain impartial as much as I could, but there was a massive grin on my face and she’s caught me.
“I was buzzing, but at the end I had to tone it down a wee bit because she was obviously gutted, while inwardly I was pretty thrilled.”
France take on Morocco in the semi-final at 7pm tonight.
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