Tuesday, April 12, 2011

Championship Soccer In AD or Live Football Brought To You By Hillshire Farms

After last week's first outside-our-apartment-window soccer-viewing experience, yesterday I attended my first live match in AD, thanks to a tip-off from my soccer-scient cousin, Nate. It was the big Al Wahda/Al Jazira crosstown-rivalry match-up, this time with the President's Cup on the line. Of course, none of those terms meant anything to me two weeks ago, and while I write this, I am sifting through research to unearth what the game actually meant.

So here is a bit of competitive context:

-Centralized Abu Dhabi has been described to me as roughly the size of Manhattan, and it's a safe bet that the distance between Al Wahda's stadium (right outside my window) and Al Jazira's home are within 10 gigantic Abu Dhabi blocks of each other. While this isn't a stage like the Yankees/Mets compete on, it is clearly a rivalry of extreme proximity.

-Like many things here, I feel the Presidents Cup could benefit from a more descript/memorable name (is Ernie Els involved?), but it's is one of the three important competitions UAE teams can win in a given season. There's the long seasonal race of the Etisalat Pro-League (the UAE's version of The Barclay's Premier League), The President's Cup and the AFC Champions League. So the President's Cup championship game is a pretty big deal.

-Al Jazira is going to win the Etisalat Pro-League fairly easily and Al Wahda (my home squadron) is in eighth place out of 12 teams, so this match was Al Wahda's last real chance to win a title and make for a successful season.

So basically, it was a locally meaningful sporting event that Tim (Leslie's co-worker's boyfriend) and I were cutting our teeth on. A most excellent bro-date amongst expats.

In the end, I found the atmosphere to be more interesting than the game itself (and I think The National agrees with me), which Al Jazira took 4-0. Once again, I don't want to overemphasize the strange factor, because I was never uncomfortable. Neither my weirded-out or fight-or-flight mechanism were ever ratcheted up, but there were things I found unusual and amusing:

1) This was easily the most "Arab" experience I have had since I arrived in AD - which is to say the percentages of westerners, far-east Asians, etc. was very low. More than half of all attendees were dressed in the white dishdasha customary of Arabian Peninsula men, and many of the others were Arabs in street clothes. A few donned the American fratboy costume of 2003, the florescent polo with popped collar and hair spiked in the middle from both direction. That look slayed me back then, and I'm happy to be in a place where someone finds it cool enough to wear again!

I had no idea what the demographic breakdown would be beforehand, and when I saw it was mostly Emirati, I wasn't sure if we would be seen as unwelcome or special guests. The answer: neither.

2) Even less present than westerners were women, which I found far more unnerving. We only saw 2 females (girls with fathers) in the entire crowd.

As I have aged, I have developed a theory that it's very difficult for men in groups to come off as non-douchey, and the higher the man-to-woman ratio, the worse it tends to get. A large pool of unchecked testosterone leads to behavior that would make us individually wince, sometimes in terms of aggressiveness but most commonly in the form of unfunny sex humor. So once I saw the breakdown, I wasn't a little displeased, and I was hyper-prepared to experience UAE-brand douchiness. In the end, it actually wasn't too bad - monumentally better than if there was ever a 99.9% male crowd at the Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum - but I still would prefer the soccer experience at UAE to have women around to ground us.

3) I knew going in that soccer was the biggest sport here - but I didn't know how strong the allegiances would be to the local teams. Premier League and UEFA seem to get the most news coverage, and I thought there was a good chance that the fans would be "just there to see professional soccer," (which I assume is the atmosphere at WNBA games) rather than being informed and impassioned followers of Al Wahda or Al Jazira.

I was wrong, as allegiances were clearely delineated. In fact, they had security men lining the grounds, because they were apparently worried about a ruckus between fan bases. We didn't see anything like that, but I tend to feed off the passions of others, so I enjoyed the partisanship, the musical chanting and the Arabic cursing at mindless throughball attempts.

4) The match was held at Zayed Sports City Football Stadium, which is part of a giant sports complex probably 10 miles away from us. If I can get involved in adult-league sports, I believe the games would likely be played on the Sports City grounds, be it soccer, American football, basketball or whatever. The pictures make it look nice, but this stadium seemed fairly antiquated to me in terms of the quality of seating, a total lack of scoreboards and replay-capable jumbotrons and other facilities. If this is one of the best The Gulf has to offer, I can't imagine the work that Qatar will need to do to have proper stadiums by the 2022 World Cup.

5) Admission was free! Great for our wallets, but it sure seems like bad business. I'm sure the team owners are flush, but I also think that based on the interest level, people would have paid a little to get in. If you don't charge anything for a championship game, you're developing expectations that everything should be free. Considering the mediocre quality of the grounds and the less-than-mediocre level of play - I would think more cashflow could be put to good use.

6) As for the game itself, my feeling is that MLS teams could beat these teams pretty handily. Many soccer fans and soccer haters alike enjoy badmouthing the MLS, but I think it's worth appreciating that we can put forth a professional league of that quality when soccer garners the 5th or 6th highest interest at most among pro sports. There are plenty of countries like the UAE who don't have that level of product, even though soccer ranks No. 1. So I advocate appreciating MLS for what it is, rather than incorrectly labeling it as less or unrealistically expecting it to be more.

In this game, I actually thought Al Wahda stood out as the more skilled, but they weren't creative enough in the attacking third and they missed a few finishing chance. On the other side, Al Jazira had an oafy Brazilian named Bare who had a real villainous Cobra Kai look to him, and his style of play fit. Mostly you could find him arriving late to the ball and challenging like a reckless thug, just plowing through guys. While he received one yellow card, I feel strongly he deserved to be tossed early, which makes me considering trying to become a big-time UAE soccer ref.

Unfortunately, Bare also somehow scored 2 goals on a header and an individual slalom through the Al Wahda defense, and he assisted with a nifty cross on another, despite looking pretty unskilled most of the time. I'm guessing this jerk somehow was able to keneticize the douchey energy supplied by the all-male crowd. Furthermore, Al Wahda has now surrendered seven goals and scored zero since I became aware of their existence, so I'm worried I brought bad joojoo to my new home team.

4 comments:

  1. Dan:
    This was a really interesting account, despite my zero understanding of soccer. I thinki you SHOULD sign up as a ref! Aunt Nancy

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  2. Bad joojoo?? Sounds like a bad French wine. However, I did like the part about Dan, the soccer ref. I can see you in that role putting Bare in the timeout chair. Nancy--soccer = kick ball in goal.........no, the other team's goal!

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  3. Dan, do you think I would have been one of the best players out there?

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  4. Your first derby!

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