Cup Night

Since the school thing fell apart this term I’ve been pretty restricted in my activities. Not only do I have nothing to study for or anything to do downtown every weekday morning, but I don’t have any money either. But last week there were a few events that I’d either prepared for before the school crap or I was willing to splurge on.

Wednesday it was the cup match against Seattle. We’ve known for awhile that there was the possibility of this matchup, so long as we won the previous rounds of the Open Cup against some amateur or low-level pro teams. The Timbers Army did a lot of work in talking up the match and I’d even convinced three people who aren’t regulars to show up. However, a few days before the match they announced that they’d be capping attendance at 16,000 and that there weren’t many tickets left. Then the advanced tickets sold out. I called my friends and told them not to bother showing up unless they could get there well before kickoff, as it’d be miserable trying to find a seat, use the toilet or buy a beer otherwise.

One of my roommates and I got to the park fifteen minutes before the doors opened - over an hour and a half before the game was set to start. There were already hundreds of people lined up to get in and by the time the gates opened the line was stretched out of sight down the block and the crowd was chanting “Let us in! Let us in!” and booing passing Seattle fans. The singing started as soon as we got into the section and it didn’t stop until we’d left the park three hours later. Seattle actually brought down some fans this time, so we had people to chant at, even though we couldn’t hear them from our end. The people in the North End set up some pretty awesome tifo that included new flags and a display of giant cardboard cutouts that featured Timber Jim chainsawing the Space Needle. There were more smoke bombs before the match than I’ve been around all season, including one of the nasty kind that last forever and make your eyes and throat feel like it was a CS canister chucked instead of colored smoke.

Right before kickoff, the group of wannabe skinheads (the anti-racist kind at least) that are currently the bane of my existence picked my row to crowd into, despite the fact that it was already full. These guys are like my own personal black cloud; they appear at every show I go to as well as Timbers games, don’t chant (unless it’s yelling “fuck you” to the ref), don’t dance at the shows and jump anyone (male, anyway) that catches their eyes the wrong way. Immediately after shoving everyone who’d been there for over an hour out of the way, one of them got into a fight. I don’t know who started it (and frankly, I don’t care. Fact is, it wouldn’t have happened if the assholes hadn’t been there), but everyone around was pissed at the guy, tried to have him thrown out and his friends moved him closer to me to try and keep him out of trouble. During this ruckus Seattle scored a goal. So, one minute into the game, we’re losing and I’ve got a drunk, coverd-in-beer asshole squished in next to me. It threatened to ruin my evening, but when we got a goal right before halftime the celebrations cheered me up and I tried my best to not let them put a damper on the night.

In the end we lost, but it was still a good game and closer than the gap in talent between the two leagues would suggest it should of been. Portland got over 16,000 people to come out to a soccer game on a weekday evening on short notice and about a thousand Seattle fans made their first trip down for an away match in the Rose City. Not too shabby.