Saturday, June 12, 2010

USA vs England in Rustenburg

Well, today was a great day - it was my first game day of this World Cup!

I slept in a little bit as I knew it was going to be a busy day. After getting rested, I decked out my car as best as I could. The only USA scarf I have is the USA vs Mexico one from the qualifier in Columbus, and since I don't own a window USA flag, I brought the next best thing - a San Jose Sharks one!


From here it was time to hit the road on what was about a 3 hour drive to Rustenburg, the city where USA - England was to be played.




It definitely was a bit of fun driving a stick shift car on the left hand side of the road. It took a little bit to get used to shifting with my left hand, but I'm a complete natural now! The drive was quite pleasant. The first little bit of it was through Johannesburg, but after that the drive was through little populated areas and the scenery was quite great.

There were lots of flags on cars and people playing music and blowing their vuvuzelas the whole way there. South Africa really has embraced the World Cup and are doing a fantastic job so far


Each stadium has at least one "park and ride" or place where you (obviously) park and then take a shuttle to the stadium. All of these are well signed and I found the one I wanted fairly easily and waited in line for my turn to get on the shuttle. This is when I started to notice there were actually a good amount of USA fans that had made the trip.





Inside the stadium was absolutely fantastic. I honestly thought going into the game that it was going to be a mostly English/Africa crowd, but it looked actually like it was 50% English 40% American and 10% African. I was so pleased to see that many of my fellow countrymen make the same trip to Africa that I did. I know it was no easy trip to plan, especially with the prices and the amount of time it takes to get here and back.




USA didn't get the best start going down a goal very early, but through a bit of a goalkeeping mistake, USA did get their equalizer and picked up there first points of the group stage. I didn't end up having anyone go with me to the game, so i adopted some new friends. Adrian is the guy with the camera and he is going to hook me up with a picture of the scoreboard saying 1-1. For some reason there were technical difficulties and the scoreboard was only in operation for maybe 5 minutes at the most.


Here are two last pictures for you. The first is before the game where you can see a good mixture of English and American fans. The second is after the final whistle where the English are a bit harder to pick out.







A great time was had by all.... at least by all those who matter.

1 comment:

  1. That is so freakin cool Brian! I like the Sharks flag!

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