Looking Down On Soccer

Without a doubt soccer is the dominant sport of interest around here. Cricket and rugby and golf and tennis all seem to draw more attention than my beloved Amercain team sports, which doesn't come as a major surprise. But soccer is by far dominant, from the sports section of The National to the plentiful and varied jerseys of the children and men walking around town.

Way down the list would be college basketball - none of the other Americans I've run into, including Leslie's work or my new penpal friend who blogs about American sports from Abu Dhabi, woke up to watch the Final Four. I was awake by 4:40 this morning, 45 minutes before tipoff of the National Championship game.

My game analysis: Not quite as fulfilling an affair as most of the tournament, but the complaining I read on Twitter got a little ridiculous. Butler played a very Butler-y 20 minutes and 30 seconds, building a 25-19 lead (despite shooting poorly) because of great team rebounding, help defense and control of the clock. Then poor shooting turned into a total offensive meltdown, largely because UConn's defense knocked them completely off kilter, something none of Butler's last 11 tourney opponents could accomplish. Basically, my feeling is that a) high-scoring basketball is overrated in terms of aesthetics and b) as well as Butler has played in the tourney, UConn deserves a ton of credit for stymying them (hat tip to Chris Simms on that verb).

But back to soccer and the picture at the top of this article - somehow, Leslie set us up in an apartment overlooking the Al Nahyan Stadium, which according to Wikipedia, holds 12,000. That's not that many - but from the moment I walked in here for the first time on Thursday, I was amazed by the way our apartment overlooks it.

Until tonight, I hadn't seen any action other than a few guys practicing, and my dream of exciting nightly soccer matches seemed to be in trouble. Well I guess they won't be nightly, but while I was sitting in our living room doing some job prep tonight, I suddenly heard the chanting of engaged club soccer fans. Sure enough, Al Wahda (my new favorite squadron!) was playing Al Ittihad of Saudia Arabia. There was even some jovial bagpipe playing among the fans carrying through the night air, even though the stands were less than half full.

Well I didn't get to see any of the goals, but that's fine, because I would have been so irate at the porous play of Al Wahda, letting the Saudis drub them 3-nil! I just acquired a new team and already they're kicking me in the jewels. Apparently this was an Asian Football Confederation Champions League game:

"Al Wahda Josef Hickersberger admits he will be happy to take second place behind Saudi Arabia’s Al Ittihad in Group C of the AFC Champions League as long as his side qualify for the next round of the competition."

I still have to study up on this AFC deal, but it was pretty damn cool to have this going on more or less directly below us.