The trip to Belgrade for the return leg of the CL preliminary round begins one week before the date of the match when I set off from Bergamo with my friend Antonio for a holiday to Montenegro.
When I knew about the draw my first concern was to get a ticket for the return game at the Marakana, a stadium which is legend for football fans thanks to the reputation of the Delije Sever, Red Star feared ultras who turn the ground into a real hell for opposing teams and their fans.
Belgrade has always been a hard place for football, I remember stories of madness told by a friend who attended the Partizan-Roma game back in the eighties when part of the section where Roma fans stood was even set alight ! In Belgrade football is seriuos business so I had to be there.
First problem was to get a ticket as Rangers were allocated 500 tickets only and were all sold as packaged trips, something I couldnt afford.
In the end I was lucky enough to get help from Igor, a guy from Macedonia I met at work with good contacts in Belgrade who arranged tickets and accomodation in the Serbian city.
Travelling in the Balkans you realize how divided these former Yugoslav countries are on ethnic and religious matters and obviously football and politics mix a lot.
When driving in Croatia from Split to Montenegro every wall had graffiti in support of Hajduk, Dalmatia's most polpular football club, and their ultras, the Torcida.
These graffiti were everywhere as far as the border to Montenegro where another different world began.
Croatia was crammed with tourists from everywhere in the world: France, Germany, Italy, America etc. The beautyful town of Dubrovnik which was bombed 12 years ago by the Serbs was an open air museum with hordes of Japanese eager to take photographs of the ancient walls and churches of the old town, riddled with the usual tourist traps you can find in tourist places anywhere in the world.
Montenegro was a world apart, it was full of tourists but these tourists were all from both Russia and neighbouring Serbia, Chelsea's Abramovic being one of the main investors in the newly built country's seaside resorts. Very few were tourists from Western Europe.
And when it comes to football the scene totally changes being Red Star and Partizan Belgrade the locals' favourite football teams.
It may sound strange for a country who decided to go out of the Yugoslav federationand adopted the Euro as currency just months ago but although proud of their own nationality, the people of Montenegro have always had strong cultural and political links with Serbia and still cling to them.
To give you an example, Montenegro have succesfully shared with Serbia a history of resistance to Ottoman invasions and they've always defended their culture from Turkish domination by refusing to convert to Islam.
You can understand that better by visiting one of Montenegro's most famous monuments, the Ostrog monastery, a building perched in a vertical slope at 900 metres, a real miracle if you wonder how they managed to build it up in XII century.
There, thousands of people walk up there barefeet to one of the most important sites of the Orthodox and Christian church in a region that witnessed the never ending struggle between Christanity and Islam.
There, rumours say, Radovan Karadzic, the Serbian politician deemed responsible of the Srebrenica massacre in Bosna, would have found shelter and protection and in fact on the road to the monastery it may happen to bump into stalls selling portraits of him along with Serbian footaball souvenirs - Red Star and Partizan flags - standing side by side with the classic religious icons portraiting saints of the orthodox church.
on the road to Belgrade from Montenegro we made the journey to Belgrade by driving through Southern Serbia.
In Southern Serbia we spent one night in the town of Novi Pazar near the border with Kosovo amd once again I found something I never expected in Serbia, its population being of muslim religion.
I asked some of the locals and I was told that the region has always been a Bosanian enclave whose people are Bosniaks that is slavs of Muslim religion. They dont have anything to share with Kosovars (aside for religion) and they told me the biggest problems they've had to deal with is the high rate of unemployment caused by the demise of the Yugoslav state.
Their relations with the Othodox community which lives in the surrounding countryside are pretty ok.
We reached Belgrade late in the afternoon of August 27th.
I like Belgrade, its city centre is elegant, it's a pedestrian area full of nice cafes and Europe's most beautyful girls.
The following morning I strolled in the nice city centre and soon I came across the Rangers contingent who was enjoying the sun of Belgrade (40 degrees !) drinking in the several cafes in the streets off the main shopping area, the Mihailova.
As usual Rangers fans were behaving really well, drinking quietly soaking up the sun, guarded by platoons of the local riot police all dressed like robocops.
I waited for Big Robie until 2 o'clock and when I realised he wouldnt turn up by that time I left to meet my contact in Belgrade.
Next time Robie !
Nebojsha is a guy who works in Italy like many Serbs and was there for the summer holidays to see his relatives.
When asked about Serbia he said.' I prefer Italy for sure, here we've had so many years of war and poverty and it will take time to recover, we dont have too many expectations for the future'.
Nebojsha is also a big fan of Red Star - Crvena Zvezda: 'I was in Bari when we won the Champions Cup back in 1990, that was a team !'.
Nebojsha took me for a quick tour of Belgrade and I could still see the bombed buildings of the 1999 war, really a ghastly sight.
Damaged buildings, mainly state owned buildings where government offices were, are still cordoned off and nothing have been repaired or rebuilt.
In Croatia and Montenegro the EU is funding motorways and other projects while Serbia is still excluded from this.
That's why most Serbians have developed a sort of negative and disillusioned attitude towards the rest of the world.
'In Novi Pazar you saw Muslims live in peace in our country, in some areas in Croatia lots of Croatians of Serbian origin were regarded as Serbian citizens and forced to live as foreigners in a country where their families had always lived for centuries', Nebojsha said.
Before the game we had lunch in a restaurant outside Belgrade in the countryside, having Cevapcici that is a kind of roasted sausages, very good, regarded as Serbian traditional dish and Palacinka as dessert. Not bad at all.
After a good cup of turkish coffee, not stronger than Italian coffee, we headed for the Marakana.
We parked the car near a stadium I thought to be the Marakana, in fact it was the Partizan football ground as the two rivals' grounds are next to each other like in Liverpool !
'Red Star - Partizan is a war and I mean it, some of the main faces of their firms got even killed in feuds in the past', Nebojsha said.
The Red Star stadium from the outside is grim, you walk in a not-that-bad two-storey-houses residential area and all of a sudden you see cracked walls surrounded by weeds and bushes, that's the Marakana.
The first feeling is a feeling of hostility that I only felt in places like the Old Den at Millwall and the old Zuider Park in The Hague - for sure the Marakana is not one of the fashionable hotel-like stadiumd of the new era of football!
Then when you get in you're in a great stadium, nice pitch, decent seats and facilities and a great view.
Now the Marakana is famous for its supporters, the Delije, and believe me in terms of loyalty and support they lived up to expectations !
After a pre-match warm-up, when the teams got onto the pitch for the match they put on display an amazing choreography with flags and baloons that lasted.. all the match !
Yes they flew the flags (and I mean 30-40 flags ) for the whole game and beyond, they chanted in unison as powerful as ever, in Italy I've never witnessed something like that, amazing !
Amongst their flags I recognised some Olympiakos flags.
Serbian fans often make friendships with Greece teams for political reasons. Like the Serbs, the Greeks never surrendered to the Turks and clinged to their religious beliefs - the Orthodox church and moreover many football teams were set up by groups of refugees who fled Istanbul because of persecutions.
In fact Red Star are twinned with Olympiakos while Partizan are twinned with PAOK.
In such intimidating atmosphere I feared for the worse but Rangers held out in the first minutes and then controlled the game quite easily, the Red Star players not being as strong as their fans.
Rangers fans, I think 500 in total, stayed behind their team as usual, singing and clapping for all the 90 minutes not an easy task in such a rough place, well done guys !
Unfortunately I spotted at half time some stolen Rangers flags in the Sever end, among them the Glaswegian bar flag and the Ardoyne flag. I do hope nothing serious happened to the guys involved, as long as I stayed in the city centre the Rangers fans behaviour was excellent as usual.
Unfortunately - like in Italy - in Eastern Europe there are gangs of ultras-thugs who often ambush easy targets like isolated groups of opposing fans and Belgrade is no exception.
When we left the Marakana, the fans in the Sever end - the North Stand - remained and continue to sing for their beloved team which had just been knocked out of the Champions League.
Nebojsha bitterly said: 'if people are so fanatic to go on chanting for a football team when all is over, then in Serbia we dont have too many values left to believe in'.
WE ARE THE PEOPLE
Fabrizio