The Madeley diaries: Baggies on tour

Thank goodness it isn’t just us, writes Steve Madeley.

Readers might remember how photographer David Hamilton and myself got lost en route to Albion’s first training session in Holland this week.

Evidence is mounting to suggest the German-Dutch border is something of a distaster area when it comes to driving and navigation.

Hot on the heels of the Borussia Monchengladbach team bus’s ugly clash with a Goch gate, comes news that the Albion coach had problems of its own.

Midfielder James Morrison revealed how the Baggies’ Dutch driver lost his bearings at least three times during the hour-long trip from the training camp in Venlo to the match against Borussia on Wednesday night.

He said: “We got lost a couple of times and we all knew full well how good the coach’s brakes were by the time we’d parked up at the stadium.”

In the meantime, the Express & Star drama continues apace. We are still having trouble finding our way from hotel to the training ground, through the streets of Venlo and one wrong turn yesterday took us within a whisker of a motorway slip-road.

Worse was to come, as our attempts to avoid the motorway took us a few yards down the wrong side of a dual carriageway. It certainly got the pulse racing.

Perhaps a few tips were required from Morrison in the driving stakes, after his renewed success in the now famous Mario Kart championship.

The young midfielder has taken over from Ishmael Miller at the top of the standings.

But this has not been a good trip for skipper Jonathan Greening’s standing with his team-mates.

Already taking abuse over his high-pitched appearance in Albion’s end-of-season DVD, the captain’s eating habits have also been called into question.

Apparently it has been spaghetti bolognese morning, noon and night for ‘Jonno’, raising plenty of eyebrows in the squad. Even manager Tony Mowbray has joined in.

The Baggies boss looked over my shoulder at the laptop screen during the penning of today’s story revealing Greening’s paranoia over his place.

“Soft lad.” was the manager’s tongue-in-cheek response.

Remember how this diary predicted an increase in noise levels in Venlo now official Albion photographer Laurie Rampling was in town?

Viewers of today’s video diary on expressandstar.com can hear some distinctive laughter around the 11sec mark.

He was at least 200 yards away…