Hugs and stuff

Last night I attended my first live football game. It was a queer mixture of one of the world’s best football teams and one of the world’s worst football teams; Brazil v Tanzania. And despite clearly being out of their league the Tanzanians gave it everything they had. It wasn’t enough but they did manage to score one goal which mitigated the 5 that Brazil scored a little bit.

I loved the atmosphere of it all because as a friendly nobody really minded the score and were there to support their home team but also to enjoy seeing Brazil. One man even went so far as to hop over several barriers in order to run into the centre of the pitch and hug Kaka. He then merrily went on his way and handed himself over to the security guards who, let’s be honest, had been doing a less than sterling job in order for him to be able to get to that point. The man got one of the biggest cheers of the evening.

Other interesting occurrences that don’t generally happen in your average football match included watching someone play with powerpoint presentations and excel spreadsheets on the big screen before play, at half time and after the match, the CD playing the national anthem getting stuck and repeating the first few bars over and over, hundreds of little kids being allowed to stream into the stadium for the last few minutes as it was half empty anyway and general agreement all around that the pitch invader was probably going to be beaten by the police and nobody being particularly worried about it.

All in all, a success! And to top it off I found out yesterday my parents are coming to visit in three weeks time! I haven’t seen them in over a year so I am understandably excited and will be giving more time to that later.