Liechtenstein's quiet world stirs at last

While one fervently hopes that there is no poor behaviour by England fans in Liechtenstein for today's Euro 2004 qualifier, and that the expected anti-war demonstration passes peacefully, there is no doubt that the tiny principality, the world's fourth smallest nation, could do with livening up.

The Old Castle Inn on Aulestrasse, with precisely eight customers, was the most happening place here in the capital on Wednesday evening – and that only because the waitress accidentally dropped an apfelstrudel mit vanillesauce into a punter's lap.

Even the Liechtensteiners themselves concede that theirs is not a country of bacchanalian excess, or indeed any kind of excess, except, surreally and, as pointed out yesterday by my colleague Nick Harris, an excess of Mario Fricks. The football team's former captain and leading striker is called Mario Frick, as is the former Prime Minister. Which is an unhappy coincidence as far as Mario Frick, footballer, is concerned. For Mario Frick, politician, has been receiving death threats on account of his leading role in a recent campaign to deny the country's constitutional monarch, Prince Hans-Adam II, a greater share of power.

On 16 March, the issue was finally decided in a referendum, in which 65 per cent of the 32,842 population voted in favour of the prince. Not unlike the Mick McCarthy-Roy Keane imbroglio, this one involved some epic petulance (the prince intimated that if he lost the referendum, he was leaving to live in Vienna) and divided families, possibly terminally. I met one elderly monarchist who told me that he is now estranged from his daughter, because she voted against the prince.

With the referendum just two weeks ago, and now the arrival of lots of loud men waving the flag of St George, this month is shaping up to be the most dramatic in Liechtenstein's 200-year history as a sovereign state.

Normally, the most pressing concerns in the country, which occupies 64 square miles between Switzerland and Austria, are intensely parochial.

"If a farmer is losing a cow the government is debating it forever," said Adrian Dill, who runs a Vaduz souvenir shop. And the emotion whipped up by the referendum was decidedly atypical. I asked Robert Brustle, a sports writer with Liechtensteiner Volksblatt, one of the country's two daily newspapers, whether there was much singing and dancing in the streets of Vaduz following the defeat of Azerbaijan in in 1998, which remains the national football team's only victory in the last 38 competitive matches? "Singing? Dancing? In this land, no," he said. "Maybe they stand up and applaud when Frick scored his second goal, but that is all." There was more excitement (but not much) when Hanni Wenzel, still the country's most celebrated sportsperson, won downhill skiiing gold in the 1980 Winter Olympics.

All the same, whatever it is that passes for fervour in Liechtenstein will surely erupt should the unthinkable happen today, and England lose, draw, or even fail to win by a sizeable margin. Moreover, just because there has been little discernible excitement in the days leading up to the game, that is not to say that there is no sense of anticipation. On Wednesday the back page of Volksblatt was dominated by "Die Rooney-Hype" – a story about the expectations surrounding "Englands Jungkicker Wayne 'Roonaldo' Rooney".

If Rooney does get on to the pitch today to make his competitive debut for England, he will be treading in my footsteps. On Thursday I was able to wander unchallenged into Rheinpark stadium and have my picture taken in the centre circle. Give or take the odd snow-capped alp in the background, and the River Rhine flowing ponderously by, the stadium reminded me strongly of Haig Avenue, home of Southport FC, where I first watched league football circa 1969. England's £80,000-a-week footballers have played practice matches in grander arenas, which could spell trouble.

In the crystal-clear mountain air two days ago I could hear the shouts of the Liechtenstein team training nearby, while the only other activity inside the stadium was two men erecting fencing behind a goal. Why they were doing this is unclear, since Uefa, the governing body of European football, has ruled that the England fans will not be permitted to stand behind the goals, reducing the ground's capacity to 3,615. This means, bizarrely, that the attendance figures for today's European Championship qualifier will be substantially less than those for last weekend's Swiss Second Division match between Vaduz and St Gallen, a 1-1 draw watched by almost 4,500.

The worry for Liechtenstein's 70-strong police force (incidentally, the 70 includes clerical assistants and receptionists) is that more England fans will arrive than have tickets. Reinforcements have duly been called in from Switzerland and Austria and the advice from police is not to travel unless you have a ticket. I can echo this, since there is very little else to do, save a visit to the home of Liechtenstein's small but rather fabulous art collection, the Kunstmuseum, which England fans will no doubt have fun drunkenly mispronouncing.

Not that, in a country where bars are outnumbered by banks, there are many places to get drunk. And the premier hotel in Vaduz, the Real, will be firmly closed to non-residents. This is a shame, as the Real's restaurant is worth experiencing. There are six house specialities on the menu: kid terrine in jelly, grilled kid sausage with white cabbage, kid with dumplings, braised kid with polenta, roast kid with rosemary gravy, and – no kidding – sliced kid liver and kid kidneys.

The morning after my dinner at the Real, not least to walk off a surfeit of kid, I hiked up Furst-Franz-Josef-Strasse towards the 13th century castle, the dramatic home of Prince Hans-Adam II, which is perched on a mountaintop looking imperiously down over Vaduz.

On my way up I met a very old man wearing an impeccably cut suit, watering his daffodils. His name was Baron Edouard von Falz-Fein, and he was in his best clothes, he said, because just that morning he had been to the parliament building to receive the Gold Leaf of Liechtenstein (first class) for services to sport. The baron, it transpired, is 91. And in 1935 he founded Liechtenstein's Olympic Committee. He was in the box next to Hitler at the 1936 Berlin Olympics and could see for himself Hitler's rage when the black American athlete Jesse Owens won the 100 metres, he said.

I spent an absorbing hour listening to the baron. He was born into Russian aristocracy but fled the country with his mother when the 1917 revolution kicked off. He was five years old. They settled in France and in 1934 he got a job writing for the sports newspaper L'Equipe. However, to travel as a journalist he needed a new nationality, so his mother contacted the then Prince of Liechtenstein, who before the Russian Revolution had been the Austro-Hungarian empire's ambassador in St Petersburg, and was an old family friend. The baron was duly given citizenship of Liechtenstein. And, not too surprisingly, was one of the 65 per cent who voted in favour of the prince, the grandson of his patron, a fortnight ago.

He waved me on my way up to the castle, which looks like something out of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. This remarkable spectacle fleetingly transported me back to the heyday of the Austro-Hungarian empire. Which, just to bring the subject back to football and the European Championship, reminds me of the story of the MEP Otto von Hapsburg, who was reportedly striding across the lobby of the European Parliament building in Strasbourg a few years ago, when a colleague asked him if he was planning to watch a European qualifier on television that evening.

"What is the match?" he asked.

"Austria-Hungary," he was told.

"Oh," he said. "Who are we playing?"