I had to look on a map yesterday to find out where, and in fact what, Estonia might be. As a kid I learned my geography of England by the location of the significant football teams. A process that would seem, whilst in my expanded horizons, to be continuing today. The rule is: if they don’t play football there I have no need to know where it is. So I sat watching last night’s match and in the quiet bits, the boring bits, the frustraing bits, I learned about Estonia. So I had time to be very thorough and very extensive. Lots of time.

The ‘where’ is easy. Estonia lies on the Eastern shore of the Baltic, just below the Gulf of Finland. I never knew Finland had its own Gulf either. You see how educational football is? And across that gulf, to the north, lies Finland. The West Coast of Estonia is on the Baltic. To the south is Latvia and its other border, to the East is Russia. Or, ‘where the problem lies’.

Because historically Estonia has always fancied itself to be Scandinavian. It has belonged, at points in its history, to both Denmark and Sweden, and is filled with fair-haired people demanding free sex and charging 17 quid for a pint of beer. But in the mid-20th Century Russia developed other ideas. And poor Estonia, sitting in a very important strategic position, was swallowed into Soviet Hell along with so many other nations with the tragic geographical misfortune to be anywhere near that monster.

Flash forward, the wall came down, Pink Floyd rose to power, communism was difficult to sustain in a land flowing with billionaires driving Bentleys, the USSR split up and in about 1987 Estonia became a free republic once more. And it does ok. Its ‘rich’ for a baltic state, and part of the EU. Poor bastards. They thought they had it bad under the Russians. So now it can once more get in touch with its inner Scandanavian. Even though they’ve never made a tv series like the Bridge or Wallander, never written books like The Girl with the tattoo on her Arse, Do they not have murders in Estonia? That inspire ‘popular international culture’??

Tallin, the capital, is known as ‘the Las Vegas of the Baltic’. Which is a bit like being ‘the Knightsbridge of Burnley’.

With a population of under 1.5 million Estonians, England should have trounced Estonia. Annihilated them. Beaten them soundly and reassuringly. Yet that wasn’t the case. So the noble Estonians, seeing England in trouble, had the decency to have their captain removed from the field of play, to give Rooney’s boys a better chance, playing against just 10 men. Still not much joy from England. Who eventually managed the single, deflected, solitary goal from a set piece. Leaving Estonia to mourn.

But what places Estonia culturally and realistically as more Russian than Scando is the fact that they keep their fans behind bars. Metal meshwork separated the crowd from the pitch. Ya never get that in Stockholm. Nor Oslo, even Helsinki. But you do in most other ex-Russian countries because the people are monsters, racists, anti-semites and thugs. Which I base on nothing other than ‘gut feeling’.

How’s your gut feeling today?

Happy monday

A xxxx