We Are! Dynamo!!*

We went to our first professional soccer football match last night. It was Dynamo Kyiv versus Arsenal all the way from jolly ol’ England. Although I enjoy football, we were mostly going to check out the crazy atmosphere and we weren’t disappointed.

The stadium were the match was held was actually fairly small with a capacity of around 18,000, but when you add in all the people standing around the edges of the stadium plus the fact they seemed to have one police officer for about every four fans, it seemed like a lot of people. We bought the cheap tickets (which were still over $20 each) and ended up sitting near one end of the stadium next to the hardcore fan block.

Most of the game it was hard to figure out whether to focus on the game or the 1,000 vocal Ukrainians chanting, jumping, waving scarves, lighting flares, jumping over the fence, banging drums, and generally being football fanatics. We had watched the film Green Street Hooligans just a few weeks ago so we were pretty much expecting the Dynamo and Arsenal fans to meet in the middle of the pitch and start swinging chains at each other, but that didn’t happen. The police had plenty of menacing German Shepherds standing by just in case. (Not as menacing as our dog, but no one is perfect.)

The game didn’t start until 9:45pm and it was a wet, cold night so we didn’t plan on staying for the whole thing, but it was enough fun to keep us in our seats. Not to mention the fact no one else left their seats so it would have been hard to get out. The only exception was a group in our area determined to get a kick ass wave going around the stadium. They spent all night trying and suffering the jeers of other fans who just wanted them to go home (which was shouted a lot in Russian behind us.)

It was more fun than I really expected so who knows, maybe we’ll go again.

*This was an actual chant during the game. In English. At least we think. It was hard to tell.