Soccer

I went to a soccer game on Sunday. Some observations:

• Caps United vs. Eastern Lions. Caps United should not be confused with Caps FC. Caps is some company that used to sponsor Caps United but later sold them. Then they bought another team which is Caps FC. There's some sort of lawsuit about it and it's all really crazy. It reminds me of how the Anaheim Angels are (were?) really the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim because of some contract clause.
• I went to the game with two of my housemates, our neighbor's 12-year-old son Wilbur, our friend Timba, and his 8-year-old son Christian. Timba is a big Caps fan, so he was all decked out in green, the team's color, with giant green sunglasses. Christian had a flag and a scarf. Memorabilia for the team does not seem to be very available, so a lot of people had any old green thing they could find, including Philadelphia Eagles and Oakland A's jerseys. Eastern Lions wore blue.
• African crows, with their white jackets, flew overhead, waiting for the leftovers.
• Eastern Lions scored very early on, followed by a quick score by Caps, who kicked it into the goalpost and then into the goal. The only other goal came about halfway through the second half, when Caps powered it in from far away. So Caps won, 2-1.
• The Caps team chairman invited us to sit in the VIP seating at the beginning of the second half because he was worried that hooligans from the other team would harass us. I don't think he needed to worry about that; Eastern Lions are from the Eastern part of the country, so not very many of them showed up. The rivalry was pretty good-natured, anyway. Regardless, we enjoyed VIP seating. They had cushions on the concrete benches. The VVIPs had cushioned chairs (yep, just regular chairs, not even a recliner or anything).
• Differences and similarities from American sporting events: This was, of course, a much more low budget affair. The Caps players had uniforms that looked a couple of seasons old. The score on the scoreboard was changed by some guy on a ladder with numbers on cards. They had only two old balls that didn't match. When the ball went out of bounds, the players had to run after it themselves. The players were a lot more polite than you sometimes see in other places. They all shook hands before and after the match, and I saw one guy help somebody from the other team up from the ground. Also, there didn't seem to be as much flopping or arguing with the referee, although there were a few yellow cards.
• I saw Energy, the goalie for Caps. He didn't play much this game, though.
• People threw their litter on the ground without a second thought. I'm not sure they even had trashcans. Immediately after the match ended, hungry children who had been selling things during the game grabbed the leftover food from the ground and started eating it. That made me sad.
• After the game, huge streams of people walked home. The traffic was chaos, with everybody weaving in and out of the people. The rule in Zimbabwe is to keep moving until the other guy lets you in. It was fun, though, with everybody cheering whenever they saw someone wearing their team's colors.