INTERNATIONAL MAYHEM

INTERNATIONAL MAYHEM

Monday 5thSeptember 2011 (International Friendly)

Brazil 1 (Leandro Damiao 45) Ghana 0

Attendance: 22,700 (official figure)

Photo by Stephen Taylor



This was easily the most difficult game I have ever stewarded at Craven Cottage. It started off OK, though a few people turned up with tickets for the wrong section of the stand, and even the wrong stand altogether.

I noticed that, as kickoff approached, the stand was still not full, which surprised me as we had been told that about 20,000 tickets had been sold so, with walkups, the game should have had close to a sellout crowd. It soon became clear after kickoff that a lot of people were still outside and that they had tickets for seats that were already occupied. This was partly because people had just sat down anywhere, ignoring the number on their ticket, but in one particular case a couple supporting Brazil had exactly the same tickets as a gentleman with his son. I should have sorted out the problem immediately but decided to wait until half-time.



Photo by Stephen Taylor

Usually, this would not have been a problem but, as I was told by one of the supporters, there were ticketing problems outside the ground, meaning that there were huge delays in gaining entry. Unfortunately, the rush of people meant that I didn’t have a chance to help my Brazilian couple though, thankfully, my superviser was able to sort it out.

 

I was constantly required to sort out some sort of misunderstanding, and my job wasn’t helped by a small number of uncooperative supporters. There was no trouble, but they were not a well-behaved crowd at all and I’ll be happy to deal with the relatively angelic Blackburn Rovers fans on Sunday.

Since Monday, there have been a lot of articles in the press about the congestion outside. It seems that if, like my brother in the Hammersmith end, you paid cash on the gate, there was no problem. However, anyone who booked online and had to collect tickets on the night was faced with a severe lack of ticket office staff and very little crowd control. By all accounts, the crush was quite serious at times, and many people missed the first half, while some didn’t even get in at all.

As many of these late arrivals had tickets for the Putney stand, it would been a great help if we’d been given some kind of warning that there were still many ticket holders outside the ground at kickoff. Why on earth the kickoff was not delayed is a very important question that needs to be answered.

Needless to say, I didn’t see much of the game and wasn’t even sure of the result, never mind that one of the Ghan players got a red card in the first half and that Brazil scored quite a good goal on the stroke of half time. Towards the end of the game, I saw a few magic moments from Brazil as, luckily, they were attacking the Putney end in the second half, and it was good to see Ronaldinho at such close quarters.

After the match, there was a bit of a commotion as I was walking towards the school to sign out, when Danny Alves was spotted walking to a car on Finlay Street, closely followed by the Chelsea defender David Luiz.

Before leaving the Cottage, I walked down to the players entrance to see what was going on to see Neymar milking the adulation from the fans outside the Brazil team bus.