Much of Spain grinds to a halt and even weddings are rescheduled to avoid the competition.
Into the Nou Camp – with its 112,000 all-seated capacity – tonight comes the Real coach, Jupp Heynckes, who will know that it is 14 years since the club last won a league match there. Yet the Dutchman must triumph or else Barca – with a game in hand – will take a potentially-decisive five-point lead at the top of the table.While Heynckes is chewing his nails on the bench, the hottest reception in a cacophony of noise will be for Christian Karembeu, the French midfielder who turned down Barca in favour of their eternal rivals after a bitter 18-month tug of war.The 27-year-old Karembeu struggled initially, but struck form in Real’s 1-1 draw at Bayer Leverkusen in the European Cup quarter-finals on Wednesday. But they have a fiendish stumbling block – the smart new ground on the edge of town will not be ready until next season. Thus every match now is away, as the club stages its home fixtures at a succession of venues – St Albans, Stansted, Saffron Walden, Ware…

wherever.”It’s horrendous,” admits the Stortford manager, Paul Taylor, who gets a result merely by ensuring all the players turn up at the right ground “No one has gone missing yet,” he said. “But the whole thing is much more difficult than I ever imagined It’s been a huge wrench to leave. It’s a shame in a way, because the club have been there for many, many years.”Seventy-eight years, in fact. The booklet, entitled “Field of Dreams” and put together by Gareth Stephens, contains a picture of the first match played there on 3 October, 1919. It is just a playing field, ringed with the 400 supporters who witnessed a 2-1 win over Ware on that distant Saturday afternoon The players are long-shorted blurs. In the foreground of the picture, behind the long row of flat-capped onlookers, someone has flung a bicycle down on the grass.Over the years, that space was filled – houses were built along streets whose names acknowledged the man born two minutes’ walk away, Cecil Rhodes: Zambesi Road, Shangani Road, and Rhodes Avenue, adopted as the popular name of Stortford’s home ground despite official efforts to call it the George Wilson Stadium.The club facilities also grew.

First there was an old polo pavilion and a changing-room so small that the teams had to change in turn. In 1927 the club bought their own ground for pounds 300 – a sum raised by supporters rallied by a local railway clerk, Sid Rose.The 1930s saw a small wooden stand erected, and a Tannoy system which played gramophone records. Cigarettes and chocolates were sold by Rose from an usherettes’ box. In 1962, the wooden stand was replaced by a brick one…Progress, in bricks and mortar.

This week I walked a familiar route to the ground where I had reported on the then soaring fortunes of Bishop’s Stortford FC during the early 1980s. In that time, with the likes of Radford, Terry Sullivan and Lyndon “Bald Eagle” Lynch leading the line, they had won the FA Trophy at Wembley, and engaged in high profile FA Cup runs which saw them visited by a Middlesbrough team managed by Malcolm Allison in his fedora-wearing, cigar-chomping pomp.”Crest Homes,” the sign on the ground said “Coming soon A development of 2, 3 and 4-bedroomed houses.”Coming soon. WHENEVER Barcelona and Real Madrid lock horns, the Spanish media gorges itself on another “game of the century” and today’s feast at the Nou Camp is no exception. Given the background of the clubs – Barca representing the Catalans and Real the Castilian seat of a once repressive government – the passions aroused are more akin to England v Scotland in their intensity. Fan Zhiyi, who plays for Shanghai Shenhua, spent a week with Southampton earlier this year and will return to England on Monday for a three-week stint with Spurs.Jean-Jacques Eydelie has signed for Walsall from the Swiss side Sion.