My Day As A Hooligan

When I was in England last month, I went to a soccer game. It was good times. Here are two pictures.



The red arrow is pointing to my uncles, aunt, and dad, who got to sit in the season ticket seats. My cousins, brother, and another uncle (he married into the family, so he has to sit in the cheap seats with us) sat behind the goal. Fulham has one of the smallest stadiums of any premiership team (they call it a "cottage," for God's sake), so pretty much every seat there is nice and close. In fact, if you happened to watch the December 23 Westham-Fulham game on television, you probably saw me in the crowd. If you have HDTV, you might have even been able to make out some of my facial features. I'm famous!

I ate a meat pie and drank a beer during the game, and only later realized that you weren't allowed to bring beer into the stadium. You had to drink it outside, and the vendors could only sell it before or after the game or during halftime. Not during. Also, they sold plastic bottles of beer only. No cups, no glass. I informed my cousins that this was truly wimpy, and that at American baseball games, you could drink all the beer you wanted in the stadium. They responded that this might be true, but in England, the drinking age is eighteen and also, baseball games are boring. I got my beer into the stadium because I walked right on with it and no one caught me. I think it's better that way; if I had to stay outside with it, I would've had to drink it really fast and that would have made me drunk and surly. The game was disappointingly riot-free, but the score at the end was what you'd expect:



A lovely afternoon!