well, i finally got to see a match. it’s not a premier league match, but an f.a. cup match between 2 premier league teams. bolton is currently 7th and west ham is a surprising 9th. even though it wasn’t sold out (wed night, freezing cold, hard to figure out why?) there was still an incredible atmosphere in the stadium. i was able to just pay at the gate and get a ticket. nice. i believe they said the attendance was something like 26,000. the stadium supposedly holds 35,647.
the game itself was fairly exciting, though not pretty. neither side played particularly well, and west ham ended up winning inspite of itself through an own goal and a mele in front of the goal that resulted in the ball in the back of the net. bolton’s lone goal was better, a solid strike from the top of the box. the match was tied at full time and went into 2 15 minute overtime periods. west-ham scored their second about 6 minutes into the first period. overall, an excellent experience. i think the thing that separates these fans from the american sport fans is the singing in unison. there’s no organization just random yelling. not that there was formal organization here, it just happens, probably through history.
hopefully i’ll have good luck this weekend and get into both the arsenal match on saturday and fulham v chelsea on sunday.
and now, some pictures. i didn’t take any during the action because i was too busy watching the game.
these are some pre game pics. probably still 15 minutes until kickoff.
at half time, they actually had a dance team: the hammerettes. they must have been freezing in those outfits because it had to be somewhere close to 0c. there was extremely mild smattering of applause following the dancing. no one seemed to be paying any attention. i think that sort of thing only really goes over at nba games. everywhere else, i would think most people are too far away.
hopefully you can view these videos. while the video is some form of mpeg-4, it sucks that it’s in an avi and not the mp4 container. the audio is also something weird. why can’t companies fully use standards? who is this really benefiting? one negative about the video is that it you can’t zoom. the regular 3x optical for stills isn’t really sufficient either.
i can’t get the other videos to upload right now due to this bad connection. i’ll have to do it later on.
on the downside, it looks like ze germans are going to fall through. seems they’re about as reliable as a volkswagon. too bad he couldn’t have informed me of this 7 days ago so i could have been persuing other options. oh well. i do have a few leads and found a company that finds you flats. that’s definitely what i need. pay someone to solve the problem for me.
i have some more stuff to post, but need to get out and find somewhere to live, again. i need to go into a coma for a few weeks and take a vacation.
Looks like you got good seats. Hope you can make it to the weekend’s games. Go Fulham!!
No luck on the video.
Video didn’t work for me either. It looks like it’s in the admin (wp-admin) folder. That seems kind of weird. Maybe that’s what it is.
Regardless, good to see you got into a game finally.
Also, I think the thing about singing and history is on the mark. Kind of like how all 80,000+ at Bryant-Denny know the words to “Rammer Jammer.” They don’t need to flash the words on the jumbotron, everybody knows them.
re: “rammer jammer”, it’s also better words than that “goals! goals! goals!” crap at the u.s. games.
The stills were weird looking to me. Almost like a Daniel Moore painting or something – semi-real looking. Glad you finally made a game.
BTW, no problem with the video here. It was short, but played ok. Let’s get the zoom working on the dance team.
I tried to play the video in the VLC player and the picture comes up but it is just still.
finally saw the video…..all 8 seconds of it.