Vitesse 0:2 Ajax

Warning: the subsequent post may well be (read: will be) largely opaque and uninteresting to you unless you have some interest in the soccer (or the "football" or the "Fußball"--the last of which options I included just because I love doing the ß-dealie with the German keyboards).

So the broad readership certainly knows by this point that I have an unhealthy and difficult to explain obsession with the aforementioned sport. When pressed to explain, I´m typically at a loss--I never played it as a youth and had no real reason to pick it as the obsession du jour. But at least one way in which I might make sense of it is that it´s a window onto foreign cultures in which I´m interested. Thus when traveling I´ve always made a point to go see a soccer match if possible as something approaching an authentic experience of the local culture.

No exception this visit, hence a couple days ago (yes, I am behind on my posts) I traveled way the hell out of my way (hour train ride from Amsterdam to Arnhem in northern Holland) to see a late-season game between Ajax of Amsterdam (the Dutch equivalent of the Yankees, especially insofar as they´re currently in the midst of a disappointing season) and the local team, Vitesse Arnhem (no clue why they adopted a French word for their team).

The journey itself must rate among my greatest (ie most efficient, least problematic) travel triumphs. I managed to negotiate the Amsterdam-Arnhem journey without trouble, then wandered almost by accident onto a bus that happened to be the express to the stadium (the bus driver did not charge me, perhaps in an attempt to prevent me from making any further attempts to speak to her in Dutch), was deposited in front of the door to the ticketing booth, which I entered to find the very woman with whom I had corresponded about purchasing a ticket, wandered into the nearest entrance which happened to be the exact one that corresponded to my seat, and with much pointing and gesticulating and a briefly unsettling run-in with the local police (they only wanted to search my bag, but with my growing arrest record you can understand my trepidation), managed to find my seat. It was, grossly, adorned with an enormous piece of bird shite, but that merely provided an extra use for my game program. Plus, there are cultures in which the shitting birds are supposed to be good luck.

The game itself was totally gripping for me, which means it was probably only average for the observer for whom the experience lacked novelty. The first half was dour and chippy (i.e., lots of fouls--Britishisms are inevitable when most of the soccer reports one reads are by Brits), with Vitesse carving out more of the chances. They went close twice from free kicks, hitting the crossbar on one occasion. Ajax came on more in the second half, finally opening the scoring with a header off a free kick. And when Vitesse missed a penalty, they wilted and that pretty much ended the contest. Ajax´s number 10, Rafael van der Vaart, scored a nice goal late and things finished 2-0 to Ajax.

So in order to rescue this post for those of you who aren´t fans of the soccer, a few of the anthropological notes that I took down while there:
==Until Sunday, I had labored under the misonception that there are no Dutch yobs (or, less politely, hicks). I´d really only ever been in Amsterdam, and everyone there seemed kind of slick and urban, and I somehow formed the impression that the entire country was urbane. On Sunday, in remote Arnhem, I realized: not so. Holland has as high a percentage of beer-swilling, obscenity-shouting, ass-scratching, odiferous-burp-belching jackasses as any country. So I felt very much at home.
==The whole thing you may well have heard about soccer violence (from ESPN) or Europe´s unparalleled passion for sport (from any europhile soccer fan) is both true and false. The majority of fans at Sunday´s game were no different than fans at any sporting event you might have seen in the states: mildly interested on average, particularly attentive when something of consequence transpired, but more or less just kind of there. The game opened with an attempt at grand spectacle: a group of guys ran around the field waving enormous Vitesse flags as speakers blared the "O Fortuna" chorus. I got what they were going for--majesty, intensity, passion--but as the actual game was just a meaningless late-season contest between two teams from one of Europe´s better (though not its best) leagues, it seemed kind of lame.
On the other hand, the real hardcore fans, who sit behind the goals and stand and sing the whole game, blow away anything I´ve seen in a US sport (college football comes the closest, but it´s still not quite there). The Vitesse fans started singing (screaming is really a more accurate word) their songs early on, and despite being on the losing side, they only got louder by the end of the game and when the final whistle blew, they were actually kinda deafening. God knows what they would have done if their team had won. The Ajax fans, for their part, spent the entire game in this big cage, surrounded by a LOT of police. It was impressive but being caged in for two hours doesn´t really strike me as a fun way to spend an afternoon.
==You know how food at American sports stadiums sucks? It is absolute manna from friggin´heaven compared to the shite they shovel in Holland. In lieu of taking a chance on a mystery-meat croquette, I decided to go for vlaamse frites (french fries). They arrived, true to Pulp Fiction, slathered in mayo, and I ate them because I was starving. This was a mistake, as my poor overworked stomach is still letting me know.

Ah, so much more to blog on about but it grows late and I grow weary of tussling with this confusing Germanic keyboard. More soon, I promise ye broad readership.