Said By Brad

As some of you may now, but many will not, the first ever NFL regular season game to be held outside of North America was staged at Wembley last night ,and I was there. Although last week I’d not expected to be, you see a few weeks ago a friend of mine had booked tickets through an agency, there was supposedly massive demand for tickets and it was claimed this weekend they had over a million ticket requests. So anyway, she was pretty sure she’d ordered two tickets, except nothing ever turned up in the post, she called the place numerous times to be put through to some shitty customer service person in some far flung middle eastern country whos grasp of english was apar with most English peoples abillity to grasp the rules of American football. Anyway, we both pretty much gave up hope and assumed we’d been scammed out of our money. But on saturday night (the night before the game) I got a phone call at 11pm, the tickets had arrived.

Yay? Not really, we’d originally planned to get the train down to London, not like it was going to be very easy to get a train at a few hours notice. My friend had passed her driving test a few months ago, but the furthest she’d ever driven was across the city, and she’d never driven on a motorway. But we really had no other way of getting there.. so this was going to be interesting… In all fairness the journey didn’t take that long, that was probably part of the problem, how we didn’t get stopped for speeding I don’t know since she tore down the M4 at about 100mph practically all the way.. and when we got into central London she must have taken the wrong turning countless times (which backs up my theory Women are incapable of coherently navigating) and guess who copped the blame for it (me).

So anyway, we were finally in London, got to the stadium after 20 minutes on the underground with people packed so tightly together it resembled a sauna more than public transport, and as my friend (I found out there and then) is extremely claustrophobic and felt the need to take her anxiety out on my arm, she dug her nails in to my arm the whole time. I swear she almost drew blood and my arm was numb for the rest of the night. So we finally got to Wembley and I was cursing the fact that she’d ever been born, and also the fact that some people don’t seem to use deoderant and then I have to be pressed up against them on a tightly packed underground train.

It was funny seeing the number of touts as we walked the 10 minute stretch from the station to the stadium, must have been close on 20 people attempting to tout tickets, and none seemed to be doing any buisness. Anyway, the pregame entertainment consisted of cheerleaders (cue muttering to my left about how ‘disgusting’ the idea of cheerleaders is) and the British band ‘The Feeling’. Now, is it just me or does that sort of music not really seem to go with American football? They needed some more upbeat music, something a little more energetic, Not:

I LOVE IT WHEN YOU CALL
I LOVE IT WHEN YOU CALL
I LOVE IT WHEN YOU CALL
BUT YOU NEVER CALL AT ALL

(Not only that, the singer was like 25 and had a moustache, he looked like a creepy version of Freddie Mercury) Anyway,You see my point. Anyway, the game itself was rather mundane, very low scoring for American football and the commentary was extremely biased towards the Dolphins (who still lost) and nothing that exciting really happened. When we finally left the stadium, wow, then the fun really began. As you can imagine, 80,000 people pouring out of a venue is going to clog up the public transport a bit, and being the impatient bastard I am I was not going to wait an hour for the backlog on the underground to clear, and nor did my friend wish to squash back in to a carriage in such close proximity to weirdos (I am NOT! Getting Back On That FUCKING TRAIN), and I didn’t fancy having my arm clawed off again, so we decided to just walk back towards where the car was parked (A long way from the stadium, a very long way). In short; we walked for almost 2 hours looking for a taxi, or another underground station or something. In the end I managed to spot a station through a clump of trees, but by that time we were both extremely pissed off and tired, and my friend was scared out of her mind because she had some preconcieved idea that London is full of drug dealers and thugs, although we were walking down some pretty dodgy looking roads. And it was all my fault! (Women are so predictable) I worked out this morning by looking at maps we walked close to 7 miles and it that time managed to cover all of 3 tube stations on the Jubilee line. We got back to the car (eventually) and after yet another heart-disease inducing ride back, the end.

And now, some photos: (excuse the shitty quality, they weren’t taken by me)

http://img148.imageshack.us/img148/9362/hpim0405ia4.jpg
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