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| Sion's two Castles. Do they mean Sion must fight everyone? |
For our penultimate review of a Swiss Super League stadium, we made the long journey to Sion for a visit to a team that, in my opinion does remarkably well. Sion is the 20th largest city in Switzerland with a population of just 27600 and so is the smallest city with representation in the Super League. To put that more into context, the next smallest city represented in the Super League is Thun with 40000 inhabitants although 95000 are declared in the Thun agglomeration. If the agglomerations are taken into account, St. Gallen has the next smallest target population in the Super League with 70000.
What I'm making a mess of saying is that the city of Sion has far less people in the area to attract to the football stadium. In Premier League terms (though absolutely no other) they could be twinned with Wigan. But they don't perform like Wigan. They have two league titles and 12 Swiss cup wins to their name, the last being in 2011.
They are no strangers to controversy. In 2008, they signed Egyptian goalkeeper Essam El-Hadarey. Unfortunately, there was a dispute regarding the ending of his previous playing contract and Sion were accused and found guilty of fielding a player who was registered for another club. As a result, they were banned for two years from registering players. Sion appealed but the verdict and sentence were upheld, becoming effective in the winter transfer window of 2010/11.
Now things really got complicated. Sion sued UEFA and the Swiss Football league in the Swiss courts. In the course of these civil actions, the SFL had provisionally allowed the registration of 6 players in the summer of 2011 to comply with the ongoing legal process. At least some of these players were fielded in Sion's Europa League tie with Celtic, which they won, 3:1 on aggregate. Celtic appealed the result on the grounds that Sion had fielded ineligible players and UEFA ruled for the Scottish club. Sion were forced to forfeit the tie, a decision that they naturally took to the Court of arbitration in Sport (CAS). They lost again and so took CAS to the Swiss civil court.
By this time, everyone was thoroughly fed up with Sion's courtroom antics and UEFA got tough. They and FIFA threatened to suspend all Swiss teams including the national team from international competition unless Sion were appropriately punished by the SFA for their continued rules violations. Although originally reluctant to do this due to pending civil actions against them, the SFA eventually succumbed to the considerable pressure and Sion were deducted 36 league points (3 points for every game where an ineligible player was fielded).
As a result, they finished last season in 9th place but maintained Super League status by beating FC Aarau in a play-off game (I really wish they hadn't done that - the reasons for which will become apparent in a future article).
Is this the end of the Sion saga? I certainly hope so!
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| Looks alright - at first sight! |
Back to our day, and its was quite a journey down to Sion but, as ever on trains that connected uncannily. At Sion and Mrs. Duck demonstrated her opinion of the place by throwing her Coke all over MacDonalds.
We then had a 20 minute not unpleasant walk to a stadium that looked quite good. From the outside, whilst its not beautiful, it does show more character than St. Jakobspark or Stade de Suisse.
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| Are they trying to keep people out or in? |
As we got closer, I began to get less keen. The height of the fences around the stadium started to give me my first feelings of trepidation.
But no problem in purchasing tickets and at 25 SFr for a standing ticket, quite reasonable for the Super League. Security was very thorough but polite. It is the only stadium so far where I have been asked to empty my rucksack.
I did this and my emergency corkscrew was confiscated and I was informed where it could be collected after the game.
I'm in two minds about this confiscation. On the one hand, the corkscrew has a blade for foil-cutting so could be classed as a knife. Fair confiscation. On the other hand, the corkscrew has also been discovered as I have boarded planes in the past and was not confiscated. Anyway, it cost 5 Francs and I couldn't be bothered to argue about it or retrieve it.
Go into the stadium and it looks like a great place to watch football. And then it hits you!
Points time.
Getting There
4 / 10. No problem on the train but in Sion, it wasn't clear how to get to the stadium. We ended up following fans, which of course works fine, but a little help wouldn't go amiss.
Friendliness
8 / 10. Nice people wherever we went. The local fans seemed interested in our Swiss 36 quest and this was the first stadium where a fan said "well welcome to the Tourbillion". Security, although thorough, weren't in any way rude or overly officious.
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| Nice Touch - Topping the high fence barbed wire |
Safety
2 / 10. What a shame! The terrace height is fine but for me, more crush barriers are needed. But the real issue is the fences.
At both ends, they are topped with barbed-wire just to make sure nobody can escape a crush on the terraces should they have to do so. Again, no fences around the posh seats down the sides. There is a bit of a moat at the sides, but its massively better than the fences.
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| I bet they didn't empty their rucksacks |
Then close to full time, in a stadium that looks to have a fair bit of wood in the structure, the Züri fans did this.
Nice! Please remember that Sion are a team capable of challenging for European competition places. Without their huge points deduction last season, they would have finished second.
I saw an article on a Swiss magazine program stating that the Kanton of Zürich were adopting a zero tolerance attitude to flares in stadia (which are, incidentally very precisely banned by law). So where do the SFA and other cantons stand on this point?
View
6 / 10. Weakened only by the obvious issue of having to be so far up the terrace to see past those fences. Fine from where I stood on the day.
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| Make some noise! |
Atmosphere
9 / 10. Loved it! Fan-cheerleaders with megaphones encouraging the Sion fans plus an intelligently used big screen scoreboard worked well.
Apart from being prats with flares, well done to Zürich too for playing their part.
Refreshments
1 / 10. Bloody rubbish. Where I was, there was only one food stall offering hot-dogs and other sausages. The poor guy in there deserves an award as he was ridiculously overworked. So I didn't sample the quality of the food as I gave up, returning to the terrace having already missed the first goal of the second half due to Sion's incompetence in staffing their stadium adequately. Yes, I was pissed!
Cold drinks seemed only available in 33cl. The beer was Calendar, which is an improvement on Feldshitschen. The water was sparkling. More bitching from Mrs. Duck!
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| Now that is beautiful! |
Overall
30 / 60.
Redeeming Feature
Look at that home shirt! For some reason I find it exceedingly attractive and wonder why a certain national side doesn't have such good taste!
I'd nearly give them an extra 10 for that. Nearly but not quite!
The Match
Really good, in fact probably the best I've seen on the tour so far.
Sion raced to a two goal lead in the first half. Former Rangers' star Kyle Lafferty headed home Die Serey's cross after just 7 minutes to give Sion the lead. The advantage was doubled on 26 minutes as Manset found Xavier Magairaz who fired home. Zürich had their chances going forwards, but were naive to say the least at the back. Sion were taking full advantage.
While I was attempting to sample the Hot Dogs, Zürich pulled one back. No idea what the goal was like but it was scored by Mario Gavranovic. Now we had a game! Züri pressed for the rest of the game with Sion reduced to countering. The ending was very predictable. On 94 minutes a corner was played into the middle of the Sion area and Jorge Teixeira headed in unchallenged. Zürich went wild. Sion's heads went in their hands!
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