Football game!

Today I went to quite an exciting football game. Some (aka, the announcer) declared it to be the most important game of our lives. That means ALL of us. To sum it, Southampton beat Southend 4-1 to secure a 6th place finish in the Championship League, meaning they will now enter the play-offs with the 3rd through 5th place teams to compete for a spot in the Premiere League, which contains the big boys such as Manchester United. The 1st and 2nd place teams in the Championship League get automatic upgrades, and the bottom three teams in each league get demoted. Somewhat luckily for Southampton, Southend is one of those teams for the Championship League, implying they are not good. So now Southampton plays Derby, who finished third, next Saturday, and the winner of that game will go to the championship game at Wembley Stadium the night before my tranportation management final.

Back to the game... it was a sell-out, with 32,008 in attendence. There was a touching tribute before the game for the recently deceased Alan Ball, including people on one of the main stands spelling out his name in silver placards. While there was a lot more falling down in this game than in many of the games I've watched on tv over the years, any short-comings in the quality of play were more than made up for by the entertaining and overly enthusiastic fans sitting around us. While I could not understand what they were chanting a good proportion of the time, I was able to decipher the general chants involved things such as 'when the saints go marching in', 'f*$£ off' (directed towards Southend fans), some random bad things about Pompey ('Portsmouth'), and other various happy things. While I have never seen so many police per square foot in my entire life, there was no hooligan-ism (sad, I know). And interesting tid bit...you can't take beer into the seating area. You can quietly consume your beer until 10 minutes before kick-off and from half-time up to 10 minutes into the second half. Perhaps this is to avoid spillage. Beer is sticky, you know.