Danish Fodbold

Ok, so hopefully many of you understood the title. It's soccer to the lay person. Quite an interesting spelling though. Last night, Michael, Michiel and I went to the Aarhus GF vs. Viborg FF foldbold match. Czech and floorball Michael was able to get us free tickets for the game since his team gets many of them for each game. It was the top league in Denmark, but to be honest they were pretty bad. Mark, I am fairly confident that you could start in this league. Aarhus and Viborg are 10th and 11th respectively in the 12-team league. After the season is over the 11th and 12th teams move down a level, so this was a big game for Aarhus. The game ended in a 0-0 draw and although there wasn't much action to report on the field, the fans certainly provided enough entertainment.

It was the biggest crowd of the season with 14,077 people on hand and the atmosphere was rowdy despite the bad play. We sat in the lower bowl, under the upper bowl where the hooligans sat. I don't think there are really any professional sports fan in the U.S. who cheer like fodbold fans. The closest thing I can think of are college fans. All the cheers, hand gestures, flag waving and dancing really make the game fun. Since we didn't know the words, we joined in the cheers by just making the general sound of the words they were saying, it worked pretty well. Towards the end of the game the Viborg fans started throwing smoke flares onto the track that ringed the field. Security decided to beef things up then and sent out a couple dozen more people to surround the field. Much to our chagrin, no one decided to rush the field.

However, the best thing about the night were the "USA, USA..." chants. Turns out that there is a player on the Arhus team from the U.S. and he played at Wake Forest University. So almost everytime he touched the ball the crowd would chant "USA." Needless to say I enthusiastically joined in. Late in the game came the most unexpected thing from a fan, even toping the USA chants. Right before the US player threw the ball in on our side, a guy behind me started to recite the "I Have a Dream" speech, catching me completely off guard. If you would have asked me before I came what would be the least expected thing to hear in the vastly white Danish population, that one would have been right up there. He actually knew a few lines and then stopped.

Although it was cold and the play wasn't very good, I still had a good time!