Well, it looks like we may have missed the best day in living memory for Team GB in the Olympics because we were at the Olympics. Whilst Jessica, Mo and Greg were performing heroically in the Olympic Stadium, we headed west for the Millennium Stadium and the Quarter Final of the Men's Football.
It was my first trip to the Millennium Stadium and what a venue! I have never been to a soccer match in the States but it is how I imagined it might be there - except with 70,000 people there. The venue is clean and modern and we were sat in the Upper Tier, in terms of the kind of football I watch at Exeter it was like being sat up on top of the roof. It made for a different perspective, easier to read the pattern of the game but a lot harder to identify who people were.
Ah, the romance of the game...
It was a very different kind of crowd to your usual football match, a lot of young families and people who don't usually go to games, or even have a lot of interest in football, but who wanted to sample the atmosphere - which was fantastic. One woman I spoke to who had a five or six year old with her said that it should be okay because she had brought plenty of colouring for her.
The game itself wasn't likely to convert many of the floating voters. The standard wasn't great - Exeter City would have given GB a run for their money - and it lacked a bit of passion and even though it went to extra time and penalties - it wasn't so exciting because, nice though it would have been to see GB win, it didn't really matter much. Had Exeter, or even England, been playing, it would have been much more tense because I would have cared a great deal more about the result. As it was, this was a group of players put together for the tournament, a good thing but you know...
As soon as it went to penalties we all knew what would happen. Poor Daniel Sturridge, at least Stuart Pearce knows how he feels. The journey home was ridiculously long, though they battled gamely to get us to our Park and Ride it took over an hour's queueing and then it was a slow drag to the M4. The journey saw us get home at 1.45am but it was worth it. In the words of someone fairly local to Cardiff, we can echo, "I was there."
