Ayoba!

While I do believe that the USA-England game overall was the highlight of my World Cup experience, each game was exciting for different reasons. I will try to give the highlights of my remaining five games.

1. USA vs Slovenia- Friday, June 18 in Johannesburg

This game had the highest ex-pat turn out from Swaziland. It is a challenge to come up with five people that I know here that were not at this game.

The game was at Ellis Park in Johannesburg. Unlike Rustenburg from the previous weekend, this is one of the larger stadiums with a capacity around 70,000.

Each of the stadiums had a suspended robot camera, which if you watched on tv was your view of the game.

After it took us three hours to get back to our car after the first game, we decided it might be wiser to use one of the Park and Walks so that we were not reliant on one of the buses. The route from the parking lot to the stadium took us through some neighborhoods. The locals were lining the sides of the street taking in the excitement. It did almost feel like a local parade with everyone dressed up.

Just outside the stadium, we were approached by a guy offering to paint faces. I quickly accepted without asking many questions. Steph and I before the face painting. In the process of getting my face painted.

It was only at this point, that I realized I was having an American flag painted on my face by an Argentinian man. And finally, the final product. Now I loved the final product. Anyone can paint an American flag on a face, but only a random dreaded Argentian man could make it backwards and more than just a little scary. I proudly wore it all night including once we left the game for the fan parks later that night, despite some hefty discouragement by some members of our group. But I told Joe, if he was going to whip these dance moves out in public then I could wear my face paint.

While I was getting my face painted, other members of our crew, again with Cooper in his American flag suit, got interviewed by Al Jazeera.
For those of you who did not follow the World Cup, this was probably the most exciting football match that I saw. The Slovenia team came out strong and led 2-0 at half time. We were fairly dejected, but I did remind Michelle about the last game we had watched at Ellis Park, the confederation cup finals between USA and Brazil. During this game, the USA led 2-0 at half, but Brazil went on to win the game 3-2. We were hoping for a repeat comeback. And thanks to Donovan we were not disappointed. He booted in the first goal followed by the tying goal by Bradley. Then the winning goal came when Donovan connected with Edu on a free kick. The stadium, which predominately American fans, went crazy.

For about five minutes, before realizing that a foul had been called and the goal was called back. Despite this, the game still ended with momentum for the American team. It was a rough game for all of us. I personally went home with these battle scars.

I decided during the World Cup that there are different types of fans. These bruises should tell you exactly what kind of fan I am. I am a jumper. Every time I jumped up and down out of excitement, I would hit the back of my legs on the chair. There was obviously a lot of excited jumping during the second half!

After the game, we went to the fan park to watch the England-Algeria game. After the nil-nil draw, Jenny was ready to trade in her English heritage to be an American. They all come to the good side eventually.

2. Cameroon vs Denmark- Saturday, June 19 in PretoriaNot quite the outcome we were hoping for this night, but a great atmosphere. The stadium, other than a handful of Danes, were all pulling for Cameroon. Africa definitely united during the World Cup.

I am pretty sure the majority of the stadium was rooting for Cameroon out of a sense of African pride, but there were definitely some true Indomitable Lion fans.

3. Italy vs New Zealand -Sunday, June 20 in Nelspruit

This was a spur of the moment game for me. I decided Sunday morning when I woke up that I would like to see another game. I knew that Tini, Nick, Tao and Shaun were driving down from Johannesburg to Nelspruit for this game. So I called them up to see if I could hitch a ride to Nelspruit. I started to get a bit nervous about finding a ticket to buy when I realized that we were going to be late for the game. I was convinced I was going to be sitting outside the stadium waiting for them to come out. Just as we sat down on the bus from the parking lot to the stadium, I hear the guy behind me say he was selling one ticket. When I asked how much he said 500R. This is about what our friends had been buying scalped tickets for, but I tried to talk him down a bit. He refused though explaining that is was a category 1 ticket that was going for$160. Afraid I would not find anything else, I snatched it up. I initially had thought I would try to find a seat by the rest of the crew, but once I realized I had a category 1 ticket I decided maybe sitting alone would not be so bad. After I bought the ticket though, Nick put it into my head that it might be a fake. I was never more nervous putting my ticket into the scan machine. Luckily it worked! Turned out the gentleman who sold me the ticket was an employee of one of the major South African banks.

This was one of the tickets they had bought for their employees. This explained why he was willing to settle for so much less than face value. So it worked out great for both of us. He made a little free money and I got the best seats I had for any World Cup game for cheap! The seats were fourteen rows up just to the left of midfield. This picture was taken without any zoom.
I was really glad I went, not because of the soccer game because it was relatively boring, but for the stadium. The major support beams of the structure were designed to look like giraffes. Unfortunately I did not get a great picture, but you can get an idea from the pictures below.

We got back into Mbabane at about 8:45 on Sunday night just in time to watch the late game, Brazil v Ivory Coast. I was barely in bed before I fell asleep that night. When my alarm went off Monday morning, I swore I would not do any more World Cup games....until the next weekend anyway.