20th July 2009

Football!

I’m writing this in retrospect as I suddenly realised that I forgot to write about my attendance (that makes it sound like there had been a formal request for me to attend, much like the queen, but there was no such thing) at the Nigeria/Kenya World Cup qualifier last month. It was great, and the first football match that I’ve been to. I was with Berry (a volunteer), and met Thessa and some others at Abuja stadium. Richard, another volunteer, got us the tickets, but he went off to sit with his fellow Kenyans. They were deifinitely in the minority. We got dropped off close to the stadium and followed the long snake of people that gradually got fatter the closer we got. Everything was pretty sedate – we queued for a little while before we got into the inner sanctum, and could sit just about anywhere. We found some space on the second tier looking down onto the long side of the pitch. There were drums and trumpets coming from somewhere in the crowd, but as the seats filled up with a sea of green it was hard to distinguish where all the sounds were coming from.

It took an age to begin as the 5pm kick off was timed using a Nigerian clock. When the players came onto the pitch, the crowd went crazy. The Nigerians were preceeded by the Kenyans, who were greeted by a polite smattering of claps (I imagined Richard and his crew going wild) and then there was a fair bit of warming up before the game began.

It was all very thrilling and I thought that the momentum was kept throughout, despite more seasoned football fans being disappointed by the lack of excitement (this was my first match so eyes were glued). As you can imagine, it being a game and all, there was lots of running around and passing and I think I got to grips with the off-side rule, but do wonder how much exercise the refs have to do just to keep up with it all. Nigeria dominated in the first half, scoring a goal pretty much straight away. That was great. Lots of cheers and bangs reverberated around the stadium, but not as much as I imagined. I thought that I would have to wiggle my fingers in my ears to bring back my ear drums, but that didn’t happen.

The star of the match appeared to be Peter Odemwingie, a Nigerian player who always seemed to be in the right place at the right time. He didn’t score any of the 3 goals, but contributed to them. Nigeria scored the other 2 in the second half, one by penalty and the other because of apathy from the deflated Kenyan side. They did do more in the second half, but not quite enough to score. I was to hear from Richard later that he drowned his sorrows with the Kenyan team and various ministers at their embassy later while we were out on the highway trying to flag down a taxi along with 20,000 others.

So, all in all, great fun and I now wish I had a team to get excited about.