Fútbol
We all went to see a game of soccer last night. We went to see Argentina vs Ecuador play in a world cup qualifier match. The ground was not full and game was not great, but it was a good experience seeing my first soccer match in South America. Ecuador are not a very good team and hence the match was quite boring. The end result Argentina 1 Ecuador 0. I have some photos which are posted in the March 2004 Album in the Gallery.
This was my first soccer match in South America. I didn't have any expectations because usually if you have expectations, more often than not, you are disappointed. We arrived to the ground via taxi to find quite a few people but not a great deal starting to line up to get some tickets. The tickets were between $12 -> $25 australian and after lining up for about 15 minutes we purchased the tickets for about $18. But by the time we had gotten to the front of the queue, the line up was over 10 times longer and it had grown by this much in just 15 minutes. We were so lucky to get there when we did.
Next we headed from the ticket office to the ground and on the way had to be searched for weapons etc etc by the police. The number of people around the ground was much more than near the ticket office and we found it a little hard to get to where we were going. After finding our way to the gate, we started the climb up to where our seats were. They were near the top of this 60,000 (estimated) seat stadium so it was quite a climb. We got to our level and went to purchase things to drink and eat. I was quite surprised to find only coke and very simple hamburgers to be the only things on sale, no beer.
We got to our seats and found out that we had a pretty good view of the stadium, however we were a little too far back or too high to experience the full effect of the atmosphere in the stadium. What happened next was a little disappointing. Ecuador being only a mediocre team, we found that the standard of football not to be the greatest and game was a little boring. No one scored in the first half and even though Argentina was playing all over the top of Ecuador, Ecuador did have a few chances and could have easily scored a goal or two.
It wasn't until halfway through the second half that we saw our first goal which was scored by Argentina and we had a pretty good view of it as we were directly behind the scorer. So the score was now 1-0 but the crowd didn't explode like I thought they might as I think everyone was a little bored with the game. So the rest of the game passed and the score remained at 1-0 until we left 2 minutes before the end to beat the rush. Getting out wasn't much of a problem because we had left early so we proceeded to head to some establishment for refreshments.
We arrived at this trendy looking pub and walked inside to find these booth with a table and a beer tap at each table. The idea was that you could pull your own beers which would add up on a meter and then you pay by the litre at the end. We all thought this was pretty cool so we decided we would take a table. After waiting for about 20 minutes and having decided on what we were all going to eat/drink, we still had not been served. We were all very thirsty at this point and were talking about leaving due to the bad service. After another 5 minutes we were attended to and the first thing we asked was how long would the food take if we ordered some. We were told it would take a while because they were a bit behind. This was enough for us, we decided to leave as we couldn't wait any longer. So we never got to try the self service tap beer in the end as we went onto another coffee shop.