The Soccer Game

Update: Follow this link to see a few pictures from the soccer game. They are in no special order, and there will hopefully be more, but there are 8 you can see: http://picasaweb.google.com/JustinStruik/SoccerGame?authkey=wT9pruULPX8

Hello Everyone,

Last weekend, there was a FIFA World Cup Qualifying game between Uganda and Benin just a few minutes down the road at the National stadium in Uganda. Two of the brothers in my host-family who are still at home, LOVE soccer, as does pretty much everyone else in Africa, and no that is not an unfair generalization.

Anyways, there were several USP students going, so I thought I would ask my host brothers if they wanted to go and take them if they wanted to. Of course they did, so when Sunday afternoon came around, we ate a little early and took off for the stadium at around 1PM. People had told us we should get there early, so we did. We paid for the more expensive seats so we wouldn't have to stand the whole game and went in to get our seats. I'm not sure that we really needed to get their as early as we did, as the game started at 4PM and their was basically no one there ;)

We decided to pick front row seats so that no one would be able to stand in front of us and block our view... or so we thought. Apparently, at soccer games the front row is not the front row ;) If you want "front row" you have to sit on the railing that goes around the seats of the stadium. Thus several fans who thought that their support of the team was more important(and told everyone in our section that too) came and stood right in front of us and blew really loud horns and whistles the entire game.

Needless to say, the experience was very interesting. I never thought I would find myself at a Soccer game in Africa, let alone one for world cup qualifying. The fans were crazy, but surprisingly the stadium was only about half full, but that is likely people just not being able to afford the tickets or transportation to get there. At one time I thought we were going to tear gassed and at another I thought a fist-fight was going to break out next to me, but thankfully neither happened ;)

The good thing was Uganda won the game in dramatic comeback fashion, the bad thing was they failed to move on to the next round as they had not accumulated enough points in group play... this is a really big sore spot to a lot of Ugandans if you read any of the newspapers.

But, my brothers loved it and we had a good time.... if you ever find yourself with the opportunity to go to a game some day you should, just watch out for the crazy fans ;)

Justin